English

Harvesting Entities from the Web Using Unique Identifiers -- IBEX

Databases 2016-07-19 v1 Information Retrieval

Abstract

In this paper we study the prevalence of unique entity identifiers on the Web. These are, e.g., ISBNs (for books), GTINs (for commercial products), DOIs (for documents), email addresses, and others. We show how these identifiers can be harvested systematically from Web pages, and how they can be associated with human-readable names for the entities at large scale. Starting with a simple extraction of identifiers and names from Web pages, we show how we can use the properties of unique identifiers to filter out noise and clean up the extraction result on the entire corpus. The end result is a database of millions of uniquely identified entities of different types, with an accuracy of 73--96% and a very high coverage compared to existing knowledge bases. We use this database to compute novel statistics on the presence of products, people, and other entities on the Web.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1505.00841,
  title  = {Harvesting Entities from the Web Using Unique Identifiers -- IBEX},
  author = {Aliaksandr Talaika and Joanna Biega and Antoine Amarilli and Fabian M. Suchanek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.00841},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

30 pages, 5 figures, 9 tables. Complete technical report for A. Talaika, J. A. Biega, A. Amarilli, and F. M. Suchanek. IBEX: Harvesting Entities from the Web Using Unique Identifiers. WebDB workshop, 2015

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:28:02.023Z