Wikipedia Missing Link Discovery: A Comparative Study

In this paper, we describe our work on discovering missing links in Wikipedia articles. This task is important for both readers and authors of Wikipedia. The readers will benefit from the increased article quality with better navigation support. On the other hand, the system can be employed to support the authors during editing. This study combines the strengths of different approaches previously applied for the task, and adds its own techniques to reach satisfactory results. Because of the subjectivity in the nature of the task; automatic evaluation is hard to apply. Comparing approaches seems to be the best method to evaluate new techniques, and we offer a semi-automatized method for evaluation of the results. The recall is calculated automatically using existing links in Wikipedia. The precision is calculated according to manual evaluations of human assessors. Comparative results for different techniques are presented, showing the success of our improvements. We employ Turkish Wikipedia, we are the first to study on it, to examine whether a small instance is scalable enough for such purposes.