Understanding Graph Structure of Wikipedia for Query Expansion

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Wikipedia's article and category structure to enhance query expansion by identifying dense cycles with minimal categories that capture relevant information.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of Wikipedia's structure to improve query expansion techniques using graph-based insights.

Findings

Dense cycles with few categories identify relevant information

Wikipedia's structure can support effective query expansion

Graph analysis reveals key relationships for knowledge extraction

Abstract

Knowledge bases are very good sources for knowledge extraction, the ability to create knowledge from structured and unstructured sources and use it to improve automatic processes as query expansion. However, extracting knowledge from unstructured sources is still an open challenge. In this respect, understanding the structure of knowledge bases can provide significant benefits for the effectiveness of such purpose. In particular, Wikipedia has become a very popular knowledge base in the last years because it is a general encyclopedia that has a large amount of information and thus, covers a large amount of different topics. In this piece of work, we analyze how articles and categories of Wikipedia relate to each other and how these relationships can support a query expansion technique. In particular, we show that the structures in the form of dense cycles with a minimum amount of categories tend to identify the most relevant information.