CN-Probase: A Data-driven Approach for Large-scale Chinese Taxonomy Construction

Abstract

Taxonomies play an important role in machine intelligence. However, most well-known taxonomies are in English, and non-English taxonomies, especially Chinese ones, are still very rare. In this paper, we focus on automatic Chinese taxonomy construction and propose an effective generation and verification framework to build a large-scale and high-quality Chinese taxonomy. In the generation module, we extract isA relations from multiple sources of Chinese encyclopedia, which ensures the coverage. To further improve the precision of taxonomy, we apply three heuristic approaches in verification module. As a result, we construct the largest Chinese taxonomy with high precision about 95% called CN-Probase. Our taxonomy has been deployed on Aliyun, with over 82 million API calls in six months.