Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge

Wikipedia can support the development of automatic methods for keyword extraction and word-sense disambiguation. The Wikify system combines these two methods to automatically enrich a text with links to Wikipedia content. The system identifies the important concepts in a given document and automatically links these concepts to the corresponding Wikipedia pages. An evaluation of the system using a Turing-like test shows that the automatic annotations are hardly distinguishable from manual annotations. A second evaluation in an educational environment shows that enriching educational materials with such annotations can improve the learning process by allowing faster access to background knowledge. This article is part of a special issue on Natural Language Processing and the Web.