Proceedings of the 2013 workshop on Automated knowledge base construction

Extracting knowledge from Web pages, and integrating it into a coherent knowledge base (KB), is a task that spans the areas of natural language processing, information extraction, information integration, databases, search and machine learning. Recent years have seen significant advances on the creation of large-scale KBs. Examples include Wikipedia-based KBs (e.g., YAGO, DBpedia, and Freebase), KBs generated from Web documents (e.g., NELL, PROSPERA), and open information extraction approaches (e.g., TextRunner, PRISMATIC, Rexa). Most prominently, all major search engine providers (Yahoo!, Microsoft Bing, and Google) nowadays experiment with semantic KBs (e.g., the Google Knowledge Graph). The workshop on automated knowledge base construction (AKBC) is the venue for sharing the latest research in the area of knowledge extraction. Unlike many other workshops, its focus is on keynotes by high profile researchers in the field. This year, we are proud to welcome talks by Bonnie Dorr, DARPA, USA Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Google Research, USA Alon Halevy, Google Research, USA Chris Manning, Stanford University, USA James Mayfield, Johns Hopkins University, USA Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Dan Weld, University of Washington, USA Haixun Wang, Microsoft Research Asia Our invited speakers will share their visions on knowledge extraction with the audience. In addition, the workshop invites regular paper submissions. We focus exclusively on short, visionary papers, even if the experimentation is still rudimentary. This way, we aim to attract the latest cutting-edge research that has not yet been presented at conferences. The main means of presentation will be through posters. By focusing on interactive presentations rather than talks, we hope to stimulate discussion, improve understanding of the work, and sow the ideas for future research. This year, the AKBC workshop accepted 19 papers. All of them will be presented as posters. In addition, 9 of these papers were selected for short oral presentations. We will have presentations that encompass many interesting topics, including confidence estimation in KBs, using computers to pass an elementary science test, and mining history from newspaper archives. A best paper award will be also given to the submission with the best reviews. We hope that, like in 2010 and 2012, our workshop will again prove to be an inspiring venue for researchers in the area of knowledge management. We are looking forward to welcoming you at the AKBC 2013!