Knowledge Base Construction in the Machine-learning Era

Abstract

More information is accessible today than at any other time in human history. From a software perspective, however, the vast majority of this data is unusable, as it is locked away in unstructured formats such as text, PDFs, web pages, images, and other hard-to-parse formats. The goal of knowledge base construction is to extract structured information automatically from this "dark data," so that it can be used in downstream applications for search, question-answering, link prediction, visualization, modeling and much more. Today, knowledge bases are the central components of systems that help fight human trafficking, accelerate biomedical discovery, and, increasingly, power web-search and question-answering technologies.