January 2012 – ZenCrowd Accepted at WWW

Our latest foray into Online Entity territory was accepted at the World Wide Web conference! [acceptance rate: 12%]

ZenCrowd: Leveraging Probabilistic Reasoning and Crowdsourcing Techniques for Large-Scale Entity Linking

Abstract:

We tackle the problem of entity linking for large collections of online pages; Our system, ZenCrowd, identifies entities from natural language text using state of the art techniques and automatically connects them to the Linked Open Data cloud. We show how one can take advantage of human intelligence to improve the quality of the links by dynamically generating micro-tasks on an online crowdsourcing platform. We develop a probabilistic framework to make sensible decisions about candidate links and to identify unreliable human workers. We evaluate ZenCrowd in a real deployment and show how a combination of both probabilistic reasoning and crowdsourcing techniques can significantly improve the quality of the links, while limiting the amount of work performed by the crowd.

Gianluca Demartini, Djellel Eddine Difallah, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux
21st International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2012), Lyon (France), April 16-20, 2012.

Links to the ZenCrowd page and to the pdf of the paper.