Welcome to the Wikipedia Miner wikifier.
This system automatically augments text with links to relevant Wikipedia topics. You can try it out on
snippets of text or
entire web pages.
If you want to know the details of how this works, then have a look at the following paper:
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Milne, D. and Witten, I.H. (2008) Learning to link with Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'2008), Napa Valley, California.
This paper describes how to automatically cross-reference documents with Wikipedia: the largest knowledge base ever known. It explains how machine learning can be used to identify significant terms within unstructured text, and enrich it with links to the appropriate Wikipedia articles. The resulting link detector and disambiguator performs very well, with recall and precision of almost 75%. This performance is constant whether the system is evaluated on Wikipedia articles or "real world" documents.
This work has implications far beyond enriching documents with explanatory links. It can provide structured knowledge about any unstructured fragment of text. Any task that is currently addressed with bags of words—indexing, clustering, retrieval, and summarization to name a few—could use the techniques described here to draw on a vast network of concepts and semantics.
