Negative statements considered useful

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Hiba Arnaout - , Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Author)
  • Simon Razniewski - , Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Author)
  • Gerhard Weikum - , Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Author)
  • Jeff Z. Pan - , University of Edinburgh (Author)

Abstract

Knowledge bases (KBs) about notable entities and their properties are an important asset in applications such as search, question answering and dialog. All popular KBs capture virtually only positive statements, and abstain from taking any stance on statements not stored in the KB. This paper makes the case for explicitly stating salient statements that do not hold. Negative statements are useful to overcome limitations of question answering systems that are mainly geared for positive questions; they can also contribute to informative summaries of entities. Due to the abundance of such invalid statements, any effort to compile them needs to address ranking by saliency. We present a statistical inference method for compiling and ranking negative statements, based on expectations from positive statements of related entities in peer groups. Experimental results, with a variety of datasets, show that the method can effectively discover notable negative statements, and extrinsic studies underline their usefulness for entity summarization. Datasets and code are released as resources for further research.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number100661
JournalJournal of Web Semantics
Volume71
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2021
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-5410-218X/work/185318171

Keywords

Keywords

  • Information extraction, Knowledge bases, Negative knowledge, Ranking, Statistical inference