Using Semantic Role Labeling to Extract Events from Wikipedia

Although event models and corresponding RDF vocabularies are becoming available, the collection of events still requires an initial manual encoding to produce the data. In this paper, we describe a system based on semantic parsing (SRL) to collect automatically events from text and convert them into the LODE model. Furthermore, the system automatically links extracted event properties to the external resources DBpedia and GeoNames. We applied our system to 10% of the English Wikipedia and we evaluated its performance. We managed to extract 27,500 high-confidence event instances. Although SRL is not an error-free technique, we show that it is an effective tool, as the definition of the arguments (or roles) used in our analysis and the event properties are, most of the time, nearly identical. We evaluated the results on a randomly selected sample of 100 events and we report F-measures of up to 73. The extracted events are available online from a SPARQL endpoint1.