Instance Acquisition refers to extracting instances of a given semantic class name (e.g., car makers => Ford, Nissan, Toyota). ASIA extracts set instances by utilizing hearst patterns along with the state-of-the-art set expansion technique implemented in SEAL (see below). ASIA currently supports input in multiple languages, including Chinese, Japanese, as well as English.
Set Expansion refers to expanding a given partial set of objects into a more complete set (e.g., Ford, Nissan => Toyota, Audi, Buick). A well-known example system that does set expansion using the web is Google Sets. SEAL uses a novel method for expanding sets of named entities. The approach can be applied to semi-structured documents written in any markup language and in any human language.
T. Mitchell, W. Cohen, E. Hruschka, P. Talukdar, J. Betteridge, A. Carlson, B. Dalvi, M. Gardner, B. Kisiel, J. Krishnamurthy, N. Lao, K. Mazaitis, T. Mohamed, N. Nakashole, E. Platanios, A. Ritter, M. Samadi, B. Settles, R. Wang, D. Wijaya, A. Gupta, X. Chen, A. Saparov, M. Greaves, and J. Welling: Never-Ending Learning. In Proceedings of the Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2015), Austin, Texas, USA. 2015.
Kathryn Mazaitis, Richard C. Wang, Frank Lin, Bhavana Dalvi, Jakob Bauer, and William W. Cohen: A Tale of Two Entity Linking and Discovery Systems. In Proceedings of Knowledge Base Population Text Analysis Conference (KBP-TAC 2014), 2014.
Andrew Carlson, Justin Betteridge, Richard C. Wang, Estevam R. Hruschka Jr. and Tom M. Mitchell: Coupled Semi-Supervised Learning for Information Extraction. In Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010), New York (Brooklyn), New York, USA. 2010.
Tom M. Mitchell, Justin Betteridge, Andrew Carlson, Estevam R. Hruschka Jr. and Richard C. Wang: Populating the Semantic Web by Macro-Reading Internet Text. Invited paper. In Proceedings of the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), Chantilly, Virginia, USA. 2009.
Richard C. Wang and William W. Cohen: Automatic Set Instance Extraction using the Web. In Proceedings of Joint Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2009), Suntec City, Singapore. 2009.
Richard C. Wang, Nico Schlaefer, William W. Cohen and Eric Nyberg: Automatic Set Expansion for List Question Answering. In Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2008), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. 2008.
William W. Cohen, Richard C. Wang and Robert Murphy: Understanding Captions in Biomedical Publications. In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2003, pp 499-504.