2006-05-16

Exploiting Wikipedia for AI purposes

Firstly, I'm pretty sure I've seen a reference to a service which could tell you the wikipedia distance between two articles, but I can't for the life of me find it again. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, please leave me a comment telling me what you know about this!

Secondly, I'm perplexed that nobody has yet parsed wikipedia and used it for common-sense or other AI-related tasks such as spreading activation. Think Conceptnet, Wordnet and OpenMind. They all try to build some form of graph between concepts, you could say, and that is exactly what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia currently has 1M+ articles, easily besting both Wordnet and Conceptnet in number of nodes. I'm convinced that the number of internal links also outnumber the others mentioned here, so I think Wikipedia could be a really useful AI resource. You could even start to follow external links to get an even finer-grained link between Wordnet-nodes, although I suspect that would help very little since I suspect very few Wordnet articles references the same external URLs.

If I had the opportunity, I would try to experiment around with these ideas, but unfortunately it seems I won't have the time for that, finishing up my thesis and then going straight to getting a job. Actually, I am already trying to get a job.

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