Mining Structures of Factual Knowledge from Text: An Effort-Light Approach (Synthesis Lectures on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery)

The real-world data, though massive, is largely unstructured, in the form of natural-language text. It is challenging but highly desirable to mine structures from massive text data, without extensive human annotation and labeling. In this book, we investigate the principles and methodologies of mining structures of factual knowledge (e.g., entities and their relationships) from massive, unstructured text corpora.

Departing from many existing structure extraction methods that have heavy reliance on human annotated data for model training, our effort-light approach leverages human-curated facts stored in external knowledge bases as distant supervision and exploits rich data redundancy in large text corpora for context understanding. This effort-light mining approach leads to a series of new principles and powerful methodologies for structuring text corpora, including (1) entity recognition, typing and synonym discovery, (2) entity relation extraction, and (3) open-domain attribute-value mining and information extraction. This book introduces this new research frontier and points out some promising research directions.

Xiang Ren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at USC, affiliated faculty at USC ISI, and a part-time data science advisor at Snap Inc. At USC, Xiang is part of the Machine Learning Center, NLP community, and Center on Knowledge Graphs. Prior to that, he was a visiting researcher at Stanford University, and received his Ph.D. in CS@UIUC. His research develops computational methods and systems that extract machineactionable knowledge from massive unstructured data (e.g., text data), and particular focuses on problems in the space of modeling sequence and graph data under weak supervision (learning with partial/noisy labels, and semi-supervised learning) and indirect supervision (multi-task learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning). Xiang’s research has been recognized with several prestigious awards including a Yahoo!-DAIS Research Excellence Award, a Yelp Dataset Challenge award, a C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student Award and a David J. Kuck Outstanding M.S. Thesis Award. Technologies he developed have been transferred to U.S. Army Research Lab, National Institute of Health, Microsoft, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.

Jiawei Han is the Abel Bliss Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been researching into data mining, information network analysis, database systems, and data warehousing, with over 900 journal and conference publications. He has chaired or served on many program committees of international conferences in most data mining and database conferences. He also served as the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data and the Director of Information Network Academic Research Center supported by U.S. Army Research Lab (2009–2016), and is the co-Director of KnowEnG, an NIH funded Center of Excellence in Big Data Computing since 2014. He is a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of IEEE, and received 2004 ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, and 2009 M. Wallace McDowell Award from IEEE Computer Society. His co-authored book Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques has been adopted as a popular textbook worldwide.|Jiawei Han is the Abel Bliss Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been researching into data mining, information network analysis, database systems, and data warehousing, with over 900 journal and conference publications. He has chaired or served on many program committees of international conferences in most data mining and database conferences. He also served as the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data and the Director of Information Network Academic Research Center supported by U.S. Army Research Lab (2009–2016), and is the co-Director of KnowEnG, an NIH funded Center of Excellence in Big Data Computing since 2014. He is a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of IEEE, and received 2004 ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, and 2009 M. Wallace McDowell Award from IEEE Computer Society. His co-authored book Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques has been adopted as a popular textbook worldwide.

Wei Wang is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Carolina Center for Genomic Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received a MS degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1995 and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1999. She was a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center between 1999 and 2002. Dr. Wang's research interests include data mining, bioinformatics, and databases. She has filed seven patents, and has published one monograph and more than one hundred research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Dr. Wang received the IBM Invention Achievement Awards in 2000 and 2001. She was the recipient of a UNC Junior Faculty Development Award in 2003 and an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2005. She was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow in 2005. She was recently honored with the 2007 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement at UNC. Dr. Wang is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery in Data, and an editorial board member of the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics. She serves on the program committees of prestigious international conferences such as ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGKDD, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, ACM CIKM, IEEE ICDM, and SSDBM.