An open-source toolkit for mining Wikipedia

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is a vast repository of information. For developers and researchers it represents a giant multilingual database of concepts and semantic relations; a promising resource for natural language processing and many other research areas. In this paper we introduce the Wikipedia Miner toolkit: an open-source collection of code that allows researchers and developers to easily integrate Wikipedia's rich semantics into their own applications. The Wikipedia Miner toolkit is already a mature product. In this paper we describe how it provides simplified, object-oriented access to Wikipedia’s structure and content, how it allows terms and concepts to be compared semantically, and how it can detect Wikipedia topics when they are mentioned in documents. We also describe how it has already been applied to several different research problems. However, the toolkit is not intended to be a complete, polished product; it is instead an entirely open-source project that we hope will continue to evolve.