My diploma thesis about a system to automatically build a multilingual thesaurus from wikipedia, "WikiWord", is finally done. I handed it in yesterday. My research will hopefully help to make Wikipedia more accessible for automatic processing, especially for applications natural languae processing, machine translation and information retrieval. What this could mean for Wikipedia is: better search and conceptual navigation, tools for suggesting categories, and more.
Here's the thesis (in German; Some key parts are available in English: Outline of a method for building a multilingual thesaurus from Wikipedia. Also, see WikiWord for more information):
- Daniel Kinzler, Automatischer Aufbau eines multilingualen Thesaurus durch Extraktion semantischer und lexikalischer Relationen aus der Wikipedia, Diplomarbeit an der Abteilung für Automatische Sprachverarbeitung, Institut für Informatik, Universität Leipzig, 2008.
- Canonical location at brightbyte.de: <http://brightbyte.de/DA/WikiWord.pdf> (german) -- for the curious, http://brightbyte.de/DA/ also contains source code and data. Some more data is for now avialable at [1] and [2]. This includes full SKOS dumps for en, de, fr, nl, and no covering about six million concepts.
- Canonical entry at the universitie's document server: <http://lips.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/pub/2008-4>, deep link <http://lips.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/files/2008-4.pdf>.
The thesis ended up being rather large... 220 pages thesis and 30k lines of code. To get a quick impression, read pages 26-31, they contain a good overview. I'm plannign to write a research paper in english soon, which will give an overview over WikiWord and what it can be used for.
The thesis is licensed under the GFDL, WikiWord is GPL software. All data taken or derived from wikipedia is GFDL.
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