Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 641–650,Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9 2013. c©2013 Association for Computational Linguistics

Transfer Learning Based Cross-lingualKnowledge Extraction for Wikipedia

Zhigang Wang†, Zhixing Li †, Juanzi Li†, Jie Tang†, and Jeff Z. Pan‡† Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology

DCST, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China{wzhigang,zhxli,ljz,tangjie}@keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn‡ Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

jeff.z.pan@abdn.ac.uk

Abstract

Wikipedia infoboxes are a valuable sourceof structured knowledge for global knowl-edge sharing. However, infobox infor-mation is very incomplete and imbal-anced among the Wikipedias in differen-t languages. It is a promising but chal-lenging problem to utilize the rich struc-tured knowledge from a source languageWikipedia to help complete the missing in-foboxes for a target language.

In this paper, we formulate the prob-lem of cross-lingual knowledge extractionfrom multilingual Wikipedia sources, andpresent a novel framework, called Wiki-CiKE, to solve this problem. An instance-based transfer learning method is utilizedto overcome the problems of topic driftand translation errors. Our experimen-tal results demonstrate that WikiCiKE out-performs the monolingual knowledge ex-traction method and the translation-basedmethod.

1 Introduction

In recent years, the automatic knowledge extrac-tion using Wikipedia has attracted significant re-search interest in research fields, such as the se-mantic web. As a valuable source of structuredknowledge, Wikipedia infoboxes have been uti-lized to build linked open data (Suchanek et al.,2007; Bollacker et al., 2008; Bizer et al., 2008;Bizer et al., 2009), support next-generation in-formation retrieval (Hotho et al., 2006), improvequestion answering (Bouma et al., 2008; Fer-randez et al., 2009), and other aspects of data ex-ploitation (McIlraith et al., 2001; Volkel et al.,2006; Hogan et al., 2011) using semantic web s-tandards, such as RDF (Pan and Horrocks, 2007;

Heino and Pan, 2012) and OWL (Pan and Hor-rocks, 2006; Pan and Thomas, 2007; Fokoue etal., 2012), and their reasoning services.

However, most infoboxes in different Wikipedi-a language versions are missing. Figure 1 showsthe statistics of article numbers and infobox infor-mation for six major Wikipedias. Only 32.82%of the articles have infoboxes on average, and thenumbers of infoboxes for these Wikipedias varysignificantly. For instance, the English Wikipedi-a has 13 times more infoboxes than the ChineseWikipedia and 3.5 times more infoboxes than thesecond largest Wikipedia of German language.

English German French Dutch Spanish Chinese0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

x 106

Languages

Num

ber

of In

stan

ces

ArticleInfobox

Figure 1: Statistics for Six Major Wikipedias.

To solve this problem, KYLIN has been pro-posed to extract the missing infoboxes from un-structured article texts for the English Wikipedi-a (Wu and Weld, 2007). KYLIN performswell when sufficient training data are available,and such techniques as shrinkage and retraininghave been used to increase recall from EnglishWikipedia’s long tail of sparse infobox classes(Weld et al., 2008; Wu et al., 2008). The extractionperformance of KYLIN is limited by the numberof available training samples.

Due to the great imbalance between differentWikipedia language versions, it is difficult to gath-er sufficient training data from a single Wikipedia.Some translation-based cross-lingual knowledge

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extraction methods have been proposed (Adar etal., 2009; Bouma et al., 2009; Adafre and de Rijke,2006). These methods concentrate on translatingexisting infoboxes from a richer source languageversion of Wikipedia into the target language. Therecall of new target infoboxes is highly limitedby the number of equivalent cross-lingual arti-cles and the number of existing source infoboxes.Take Chinese-English1 Wikipedias as an example:current translation-based methods only work for87,603 Chinese Wikipedia articles, 20.43% of thetotal 428,777 articles. Hence, the challenge re-mains: how could we supplement the missing in-foboxes for the rest 79.57% articles?

On the other hand, the numbers of existing in-fobox attributes in different languages are high-ly imbalanced. Table 1 shows the comparisonof the numbers of the articles for the attributesin template PERSON between English and Chi-nese Wikipedia. Extracting the missing value forthese attributes, such asawards, weight, influencesandstyle, inside the single Chinese Wikipedia isintractable due to the rarity of existing Chineseattribute-value pairs.

Attribute en zh Attribute en zhname 82,099 1,486 awards 2,310 38birth date 77,850 1,481 weight 480 12occupation 66,768 1,279 influences 450 6nationality 20,048 730 style 127 1

Table 1: The Numbers of Articles in TEMPLATEPERSON between English(en) and Chinese(zh).

In this paper, we have the following hypothesis:one can use the rich English (auxiliary) informa-tion to assist the Chinese (target) infobox extrac-tion. In general, we address the problem of cross-lingual knowledge extraction by using the imbal-ance between Wikipedias of different languages.For each attribute, we aim to learn an extractor tofind the missing value from the unstructured arti-cle texts in the target Wikipedia by using the richinformation in the source language. Specifically,we treat this cross-lingual information extractiontask as a transfer learning-based binary classifica-tion problem.

The contributions of this paper are as follows:

1. We propose a transfer learning-based cross-lingual knowledge extraction framework

1Chinese-English denotes the task of Chinese Wikipediainfobox completion using English Wikipedia

called WikiCiKE . The extraction perfor-mance for the target Wikipedia is improvedby using rich infoboxes and textual informa-tion in the source language.

2. We propose the TrAdaBoost-based extractortraining method to avoid the problems of top-ic drift and translation errors of the sourceWikipedia. Meanwhile, some language-independent features are introduced to makeWikiCiKE as general as possible.

3. Chinese-English experiments for four typ-ical attributes demonstrate that WikiCiKEoutperforms both the monolingual extrac-tion method and current translation-basedmethod. The increases of 12.65% for pre-cision and 12.47% for recall in the templatenamed person are achieved when only 30 tar-get training articles are available.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows.Section 2 presents some basic concepts, the prob-lem formalization and the overview of WikiCiKE.In Section 3, we propose our detailed approaches.We present our experiments in Section 4. Some re-lated work is described in Section 5. We concludeour work and the future work in Section 6.

2 Preliminaries

In this section, we introduce some basic con-cepts regarding Wikipedia, formally defining thekey problem of cross-lingual knowledge extrac-tion and providing an overview of the WikiCiKEframework.

2.1 Wiki Knowledge Base and Wiki Article

We consider each language version of Wikipediaas awiki knowledge base, which can be represent-ed asK = {ai}pi=1, whereai is a disambiguatedarticle inK andp is the size ofK.

Formally we define awiki article a ∈ K as a5-tuplea = (title, text, ib, tp, C), where

• title denotes the title of the articlea,

• text denotes the unstructured text descriptionof the articlea,

• ib is the infobox associated witha; specif-ically, ib = {(attri, valuei)}qi=1 representsthe list of attribute-value pairs for the articlea,

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Figure 2: Simplified Article of “Bill Gates”.

• tp = {attri}ri=1 is the infobox template as-sociated withib, wherer is the number ofattributes for one specific template, and

• C denotes the set of categories to which thearticlea belongs.

Figure 2 gives an example of these five impor-tant elements concerning the article named “BillGates”.

In what follows, we will use named subscripts,such asaBill Gates, or index subscripts, such asai,to refer to one particular instance interchangeably.We will use “name in TEMPLATE PERSON”to refer to the attributeattrname in the templatetpPERSON . In this cross-lingual task, we use thesource (S) and target (T) languages to denote thelanguages of auxiliary and target Wikipedias, re-spectively. For example,KS indicates the sourcewiki knowledge base, andKT denotes the targetwiki knowledge base.

2.2 Problem Formulation

Mining new infobox information from unstruc-tured article texts is actually a multi-template,multi-slot information extraction problem. In ourtask, each template represents an infobox templateand each slot denotes an attribute. In the Wiki-CiKE framework, for each attributeattrT in aninfobox templatetpT , we treat the task of missingvalue extraction as a binary classification prob-lem. It predicts whether a particular word (token)from the articletext is the extraction target (Finnand Kushmerick, 2004; Lafferty et al., 2001).

Given an attributeattrT and an instance(word/token) xi, XS = {xi}ni=1 and XT ={xi}n+m

i=n+1 are the sets of instances (words/tokens)in the source and the target language respectively.xi can be represented as a feature vector accordingto its context. Usually, we haven ≫ m in our set-ting, with much more attributes in the source thatthose in the target. The functiong : X 7→ Y mapsthe instance fromX = XS ∪ XT to the true la-bel ofY = {0, 1}, where1 represents the extrac-tion target (positive) and0 denotes the backgroundinformation (negative). Because the number oftarget instancesm is inadequate to train a goodclassifier, we combine the source and target in-stances to construct the training data set asTD =TDS ∪ TDT , whereTDS = {xi, g(xi)}ni=1 andTDT = {xi, g(xi)}n+m

i=n+1 represent the sourceand target training data, respectively.

Given the combined training data setTD, ourobjective is to estimate a hypothesisf : X 7→ Ythat minimizes the prediction error on testing datain the target language. Our idea is to determine theuseful part ofTDS to improve the classificationperformance inTDT . We view this as a transferlearning problem.

2.3 WikiCiKE Framework

WikiCiKE learns an extractor for a given attributeattrT in the target Wikipedia. As shown in Fig-ure 3, WikiCiKE contains four key components:(1) Automatic Training Data Generation: giventhe target attributeattrT and two wiki knowledgebasesKS andKT , WikiCiKE first generates thetraining data setTD = TDS ∪ TDT automati-cally. (2) WikiCiKE Training : WikiCiKE usesa transfer learning-based classification method totrain the classifier (extractor)f : X 7→ Y by usingTDS ∪ TDT . (3) Template Classification: Wi-kiCiKE then determines proper candidate articleswhich are suitable to generate the missing value ofattrT . (4) WikiCiKE Extraction : given a candi-date articlea, WikiCiKE uses the learned extractorf to label each word in thetext of a, and generatethe extraction result in the end.

3 Our Approach

In this section, we will present the detailed ap-proaches used in WikiCiKE.

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Figure 3: WikiCiKE Framework.

3.1 Automatic Training Data Generation

To generate the training data for the target at-tribute attrT , we first determine the equivalen-t cross-lingual attributeattrS. Fortunately, sometemplates in non-English Wikipedia (e.g. ChineseWikipedia) explicitly match their attributes withtheir counterparts in English Wikipedia. There-fore, it is convenient to align the cross-lingual at-tributes using English Wikipedia as bridge. Forattributes that can not be aligned in this way, cur-rently we manually align them. The manual align-ment is worthwhile because thousands of articlesbelong to the same template may benefit from itand at the same time it is not very costly. In Chi-nese Wikipedia, the top 100 templates have cov-ered nearly 80% of the articles which have beenassigned a template.

Once the aligned attribute mappingattrT ↔attrS is obtained, we collect the articles from bothKS and KT containing the correspondingattr.The collected articles fromKS are translated intothe target language. Then, we use a uniform au-tomatic method, which primarily consists of wordlabeling and feature vector generation, to generatethe training data setTD = {(x, g(x))} from thesecollected articles.

For each collected article a ={title, text, ib, tp, C} and its value of attr,we can automatically label each wordx in textaccording to whetherx and its neighbors are

contained by thevalue. The text andvalue areprocessed as bags of words{x}text and{x}value.Then for eachxi ∈ {x}text we have:

g(xi) =

1 xi ∈ {x}value, |{x}value| = 1

1 xi−1, xi ∈ {x}value or xi, xi+1 ∈ {x}value,|{x}value| > 1

0 otherwise(1)

After the word labeling, each instance(word/token) is represented as a feature vec-tor. In this paper, we propose a general featurespace that is suitable for most target languages.As shown in Table 2, we classify the featuresused in WikiCiKE into three categories: formatfeatures, POS tag features and token features.

Category Feature ExampleFormat First token of sentence `}��L�feature Hello World!

In first half of sentence `}��L�Hello World!

Starts with two digits 12�31å31th Dec.

Starts with four digits 1999t�)1999’ssummer

Contains a cash sign 10åor 10$Contains a percentage 10%symbolStop words �,0,Ù&

of, the, a, anPure number 365Part of an anchor text 5qü�

Movie DirectorBegin of an anchor text 8�¾¡�

GameDesignerPOS tag POS tag of current tokenfeatures POS tags of

previous 5 tokensPOS tags ofnext 5 tokens

Token Current tokenfeatures Previous 5 tokens

Next 5 tokensIs current tokencontained by titleIs one of previous 5tokens contained by title

Table 2: Feature Definition.

The target training dataTDT is directly gener-ated from articles in the target language Wikipedi-a. Articles from the source language Wikipediaare translated into the target language in advanceand then transformed into training dataTDS. Innext section, we will discuss how to train an ex-tractor fromTD = TDS ∪ TDT .

3.2 WikiCiKE Training

Given the attributeattrT , we want to train a clas-sifierf : X 7→ Y that can minimize the prediction

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error for the testing data in the target language.Traditional machine learning approaches attemptto determinef by minimizing some loss functionL on the predictionf(x) for the training instancex and its real labelg(x), which is

f = argminf∈Θ

∑L(f(x), g(x)) where (x, g(x)) ∈ TDT

(2)

In this paper, we use TrAdaBoost (Dai et al.,2007), which is an instance-based transfer learn-ing algorithm that was first proposed by Dai to findf . TrAdaBoost requires that the source traininginstancesXS and target training instancesXT bedrawn from the same feature space. In WikiCiKE,the source articles are translated into the targetlanguage in advance to satisfy this requirement.Due to the topic drift problem and translation er-rors, the joint probability distributionPS(x, g(x))is not identical toPT (x, g(x)). We must adjust thesource training dataTDS so that they fit the dis-tribution onTDT . TrAdaBoost iteratively updatesthe weights of all training instances to optimize theprediction error. Specifically, the weight-updatingstrategy for the source instances is decided by theloss on the target instances.

For eacht = 1 ∼ T iteration, given a weightvector pt normalized fromwt(wt is the weightvector before normalization), we call a basic clas-sifier F that can address weighted instances andthen find a hypothesisf that satisfies

ft = argminf∈ΘF

∑L(pt, f(x), g(x))

(x, g(x)) ∈ TDS ∪ TDT

(3)

Let ǫt be the prediction error offt at thetth iter-ation on the target training instancesTDT , whichis

ǫt =1∑n+m

k=n+1 wtk

×n+m∑

k=n+1

(wtk × |ft(xk)− yk|) (4)

With ǫt, the weight vectorwt is updated by thefunction:

wt+1 = h(wt, ǫt) (5)

The weight-updating strategyh is illustrated inTable 3.

Finally, a final classifierf can be obtained bycombiningfT/2 ∼ fT .

TrAdaBoost has a convergence rate ofO(

√ln(n/N)), wheren andN are the number

of source samples and number of maximumiterations respectively.

TrAdaBoost AdaBoostTarget + wt wt

samples − wt × β−1t wt × β−1

t

Source + wt × β−1 No source trainingsamples − wt × β sample available

+: correctly labelled −: miss-labelledwt: weight of an instance at thetth iterationβt = ǫt × (1− ǫt)

β = 1/(1 +√2 lnnT )

Table 3: Weight-updating Strategy of TrAd-aBoost.

3.3 Template Classification

Before using the learned classifierf to extrac-t missing infobox value for the target attributeattrT , we must select the correct articles to be pro-cessed. For example, the articleaNew Y ork is nota proper article for extracting the missing value ofthe attributeattrbirth day.

If a already has an incomplete infobox, it isclear that the correcttp is the template of its owninfobox ib. For those articles that have no infobox-es, we use the classical 5-nearest neighbor algo-rithm to determine their templates (Roussopouloset al., 1995) using their category labels, outlinks,inlinks as features (Wang et al., 2012). Our classi-fier achieves an average precision of 76.96% withan average recall of 63.29%, and can be improvedfurther. In this paper, we concentrate on the Wiki-CiKE training and extraction components.

3.4 WikiCiKE Extraction

Given an articlea determined by template classi-fication, we generate the missingvalue of attrfrom the correspondingtext. First, we turn thetext into a word sequence and compute the fea-ture vector for each word based on the featuredefinition in Section 3.1. Next we usef to labeleach word, and we get a labeled sequencetextl astextl = {xf(x1)

1 ...xf(xi−1)i−1 x

f(xi)i x

f(xi+1)i+1 ...x

f(xn)n }

where the superscriptf(xi) ∈ {0, 1} representsthe positive or negative label byf . After that, weextract the adjacent positive tokens intext as thepredict value. In particular, the longest positive to-ken sequence and the one that contains other pos-itive token sequences are preferred in extraction.E.g., a positive sequence “comedy movie director”is preferred to a shorter sequence “movie direc-tor”.

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4 Experiments

In this section, we present our experiments to e-valuate the effectiveness of WikiCiKE, where wefocus on the Chinese-English case; in other words,the target language is Chinese and the source lan-guage is English. It is part of our future work totry other language pairs which two Wikipedias ofthese languages are imbalanced in infobox infor-mation such as English-Dutch.

4.1 Experimental Setup

4.1.1 Data Sets

Our data sets are from Wikipedia dumps2 generat-ed on April 3, 2012. For each attribute, we collectboth labeled articles (articles that contain the cor-responding attributeattr) and unlabeled articlesin Chinese. We split the labeled articles into twosubsetsAT and Atest(AT ∩ Atest = ∅), in whichAT is used as target training articles andAtest isused as the first testing set. For the unlabeled arti-cles, represented asA′

test, we manually label theirinfoboxes with their texts and use them as the sec-ond testing set. For each attribute, we also collect aset of labeled articlesAS in English as the sourcetraining data. Our experiments are performed onfour attributes, which areoccupation, nationality,alma materin TEMPLATE PERSON, andcoun-try in TEMPLATE FILM. In particular, we extractvalues from the first two paragraphs of the textsbecause they usually contain most of the valuableinformation. The details of data sets on these at-tributes are given in Table 4.

Attribute |AS| |AT| |Atest| |A′test|

occupation 1,000 500 779 208alma mater 1,000 200 215 208nationality 1,000 300 430 208country 1,000 500 1,000 −

|A|: the number of articles inA

Table 4: Data Sets.

4.1.2 Comparison Methods

We compare our WikiCiKE method with two dif-ferent kinds of methods, the monolingual knowl-edge extraction method and the translation-basedmethod. They are implemented as follows:

1. KE-Mon is the monolingual knowledge ex-tractor. The difference between WikiCiKEand KE-Mon is that KE-Mon only uses theChinese training data.

2http://dumps.wikimedia.org/

2. KE-Tr is the translation-based extractor. Itobtains thevaluesby two steps: finding theircounterparts (if available) in English usingWikipedia cross-lingual links and attributealignments, and translating them into Chi-nese.

We conduct two series of evaluation to compareWikiCiKE with KE-Mon and KE-Tr, respectively.

1. We compare WikiCiKE with KE-Mon on thefirst testing data setAtest, where most val-ues can be found in the articles’ texts in thoselabeled articles, in order to demonstrate theperformance improvement by using cross-lingual knowledge transfer.

2. We compare WikiCiKE with KE-Tr on thesecond testing data setA

′test, where the

existences of values are not guaranteed inthose randomly selected articles, in order todemonstrate the better recall of WikiCiKE.

For implementation details, theweighted-SVMis used as the basic learnerf both in WikiCiKEand KE-Mon (Zhang et al., 2009), and BaiduTranslation API3 is used as the translator both inWikiCiKE and KE-Tr. The Chinese texts are pre-processed using ICTCLAS4 for word segmenta-tion.

4.1.3 Evaluation Metrics

Following Lavelli’s research on evaluation of in-formation extraction (Lavelli et al., 2008), we per-form evaluation as follows.

1. We evaluate eachattr separately.

2. For eachattr, there is exactly onevalue ex-tracted.

3. No alternative occurrence of realvalue isavailable.

4. The overlap ratio is used in this paper ratherthan “exactly matching” and “containing”.

Given an extractedvalue v′ = {w′} and itscorresponding realvalue v = {w}, two measure-ments for evaluating the overlap ratio are defined:

recall: the rate of matched tokens w.r.t. the realvalue. It can be calculated using

R(v′, v) =|v ∩ v′||v|

3http://openapi.baidu.com/service4http://www.ictclas.org/

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precision: the rate of matched tokens w.r.t. theextractedvalue. It can be calculated using

P (v′, v) =|v ∩ v′||v′|

We use the average of these two measures toevaluate the performance of our extractor as fol-lows:

R = avg(Ri(v′, v)) ai ∈ Atest

P = avg(Pi(v′, v)) ai ∈ Atest and vi

′ 6= ∅

The recall andprecisionrange from 0 to 1 andare first calculated on a single instance and thenaveraged over the testing instances.

4.2 Comparison with KE-Mon

In these experiments, WikiCiKE trains extractorson AS ∪ AT , and KE-Mon trains extractors justonAT . We incrementally increase the number oftarget training articles from 10 to 500 (if available)to compare WikiCiKE with KE-Mon in differentsituations. We use the first testing data setAtest toevaluate the results.

Figure 4 and Table 5 show the experimental re-sults on TEMPLATE PERSON and FILM. We cansee that WikiCiKE outperforms KE-Mon on allthree attributions especially when the number oftarget training samples is small. Although there-call for alma materand theprecisionfor nation-ality of WikiCiKE are lower than KE-Mon whenonly 10 target training articles are available, Wi-kiCiKE performs better than KE-Mon if we takeinto consideration bothprecisionandrecall.

10 30 50 100 200 300 5000

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

number of target training articles

P(KE−Mon)P(WikiCiKE)R(KE−Mon)R(WikiCiKE)

(a) occupation

10 30 50 100 2000.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1

number of target training articles

P(KE−Mon)P(WikiCiKE)R(KE−Mon)R(WikiCiKE)

(b) alma mater

10 30 50 100 200 300

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1

number of target training articles

P(KE−Mon)P(WikiCiKE)R(KE−Mon)R(WikiCiKE)

(c) nationality

10 30 50 100 200 300 5000

5

10

15

20

perc

ent(

%)

number of target training articles

performance gain

PR

(d) average improvements

Figure 4: Results for TEMPLATE PERSON.

Figure 4(d) shows the average improvementsyielded by WikiCiKE w.r.t KE-Mon on TEM-PLATE PERSON. We can see that WikiCiKEyields significant improvements when only a fewarticles are available in target language and the im-provements tend to decrease as the number of tar-get articles is increased. In this case, the articlesin the target language are sufficient to train the ex-tractors alone.

#KE-Mon WikiCiKE

P R P R10 81.1% 63.8% 90.7% 66.3%30 78.8% 64.5% 87.5% 69.4%50 80.7% 66.6% 87.7% 72.3%

100 82.8% 68.2% 87.8% 72.1%200 83.6% 70.5% 87.1% 73.2%300 85.2% 72.0% 89.1% 76.2%500 86.2% 73.4% 88.7% 75.6%

# Number of the target training articles.

Table 5: Results forcountry in TEMPLATEFILM.

4.3 Comparison with KE-Tr

We compare WikiCiKE with KE-Tr on the secondtesting data setA

′test.

From Table 6 it can be clearly observed that Wi-kiCiKE significantly outperforms KE-Tr both inprecisionand recall. The reasons why the recal-l of KE-Tr is extremely low are two-fold. First,because of the limit of cross-lingual links and in-foboxes in English Wikipedia, only a very smal-l set of values is found by KE-Tr. Furthermore,many values obtained using the translator are in-correct because of translation errors. WikiCiKEuses translators too, but it has better tolerance totranslation errors because the extracted value isfrom the target article texts instead of the outputof translators.

Attribute KE-Tr WikiCiKEP R P R

occupation 27.4% 3.40% 64.8% 26.4%nationality 66.3% 4.60% 70.0% 55.0%alma mater 66.7% 0.70% 76.3% 8.20%

Table 6: Results of WikiCiKE vs. KE-Tr.

4.4 Significance Test

We conducted a significance test to demonstratethat the difference between WikiCiKE and KE-Mon is significant rather than caused by statisticalerrors. As for the comparison between WikiCiKEand KE-Tr, significant improvements brought by

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WikiCiKE can be clearly observed from Table 6so there is no need for further significance test.In this paper, we use McNemar’s significance test(Dietterich and Thomas, 1998).

Table 7 shows the results of significance testcalculated for the average on all tested attributes.When the number of target training articles is lessthan 100, theχ is much less than 10.83 that cor-responds to a significance level 0.001. It suggeststhat the chance that WikiCiKE is not better thanKE-Mon is less than 0.001.

# 10 30 50 100 200 300 500χ 179.5 107.3 51.8 32.8 4.1 4.3 0.3

# Number of the target training articles.

Table 7: Results of Significance Test.

4.5 Overall Analysis

As shown in above experiments, we can see thatWikiCiKE outperforms both KE-Mon and KE-Tr.When only 30 target training samples are avail-able, WikiCiKE reaches comparable performanceof KE-Mon using 300-500 target training samples.Among all of the 72 attributes in TEMPLATEPERSON of Chinese Wikipedia, 39 (54.17%) and55 (76.39%) attributes have less than 30 and 200labeled articles respectively. We can see that Wi-kiCiKE can save considerable human labor whenno sufficient target training samples are available.

We also examined the errors by WikiCiKE andthey can be categorized into three classes. For at-tribute occupation when 30 target training sam-ples are used, there are 71 errors. The first cat-egory is caused by incorrect word segmentation(40.85%). In Chinese, there is no space betweenwords so we need to segment them before extrac-tion. The result of word segmentation directlydecide the performance of extraction so it caus-es most of the errors. The second category is be-cause of the incomplete infoboxes (36.62%). Inevaluation of KE-Mon, we directly use the val-ues in infoboxex as golden values, some of themare incomplete so the correct predicted values willbe automatically judged as the incorrect in thesecases. The last category is mismatched words(22.54%). The predicted value does not match thegolden value or a part of it. In the future, we canimprove the performance of WikiCiKE by polish-ing the word segmentation result.

5 Related Work

Some approaches of knowledge extraction fromthe open Web have been proposed (Wu et al.,2012; Yates et al., 2007). Here we focus on theextraction inside Wikipedia.

5.1 Monolingual Infobox Extraction

KYLIN is the first system to autonomously ex-tract the missing infoboxes from the correspond-ing article texts by using a self-supervised learn-ing method (Wu and Weld, 2007). KYLIN per-forms well when enough training data are avail-able. Such techniques as shrinkage and retrainingare proposed to increase the recall from EnglishWikipedia’s long tail of sparse classes (Wu et al.,2008; Wu and Weld, 2010). Different from Wu’sresearch, WikiCiKE is a cross-lingual knowledgeextraction framework, which leverags rich knowl-edge in the other language to improve extractionperformance in the target Wikipedia.

5.2 Cross-lingual Infobox Completion

Current translation based methods usually con-tain two steps: cross-lingual attribute alignmen-t and value translation. The attribute alignmen-t strategies can be grouped into two categories:cross-lingual link based methods (Bouma et al.,2009) and classification based methods (Adar etal., 2009; Nguyen et al., 2011; Aumueller et al.,2005; Adafre and de Rijke, 2006; Li et al., 2009).After the first step, the value in the source lan-guage is translated into the target language. E.Adar’s approach gives the overall precision of54% and recall of 40% (Adar et al., 2009). How-ever, recall of these methods is limited by thenumber of equivalent cross-lingual articles and thenumber of infoboxes in the source language. It isalso limited by the quality of the translators. Wi-kiCiKE attempts to mine the missing infoboxesdirectly from the article texts and thus achievesa higher recall compared with these methods asshown in Section 4.3.

5.3 Transfer Learning

Transfer learning can be grouped into four cate-gories: instance-transfer, feature-representation-transfer, parameter-transfer and relational-knowledge-transfer (Pan and Yang, 2010).TrAdaBoost, the instance-transfer approach, isan extension of the AdaBoost algorithm, anddemonstrates better transfer ability than tradition-

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al learning techniques (Dai et al., 2007). Transferlearning have been widely studied for classifica-tion, regression, and cluster problems. However,few efforts have been spent in the informationextraction tasks with knowledge transfer.

6 Conclusion and Future Work

In this paper we proposed a general cross-lingualknowledge extraction framework called Wiki-CiKE, in which extraction performance in the tar-get Wikipedia is improved by using rich infobox-es in the source language. The problems of topicdrift and translation error were handled by usingthe TrAdaBoost model. Chinese-English exper-imental results on four typical attributes showedthat WikiCiKE significantly outperforms both thecurrent translation based methods and the mono-lingual extraction methods. In theory, WikiCiKEcan be applied to any two wiki knowledge basedof different languages.

We have been considering some future work.Firstly, more attributes in more infobox templatesshould be explored to make our results muchstronger. Secondly, knowledge in a minor lan-guage may also help improve extraction perfor-mance for a major language due to the cultural andreligion differences. A bidirectional cross-lingualextraction approach will also be studied. Last butnot least, we will try to extract multipleattr-valuepairs at the same time for each article.

Furthermore, our work is part of a more ambi-tious agenda on exploitation of linked data. On theone hand, being able to extract data and knowl-edge from multilingual sources such as Wikipedi-a could help improve the coverage of linked datafor applications. On the other hand, we are alsoinvestigating how to possibly integrate informa-tion, including subjective information (Sensoy etal., 2013), from multiple sources, so as to bettersupport data exploitation in context dependent ap-plications.

Acknowledgement

The work is supported by NSFC (No. 61035004),NSFC-ANR (No. 61261130588), 863 High Tech-nology Program (2011AA01A207), FP7-288342,FP7 K-Drive project (286348), the EPSRC WhatIfproject (EP/J014354/1) and THU-NUS NExT Co-Lab. Besides, we gratefully acknowledge the as-sistance of Haixun Wang (MSRA) for improvingthe paper work.

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