Cross-domain knowledge bases such as YAGO, DBpedia, or the Google Knowledge Graph are being used as background knowledge within an increasing range of applications including web search, data integration, natural language understanding, and question answering. The usefulness of a knowledge base for these applications depends on its completeness. Relational HTML tables from the Web cover a wide range of topics and describe very specific long tail entities, such as small villages, less-known football players, or obscure songs. \nThis systems and applications paper explores the potential of web table data for the task of completing cross-domain knowledge bases with descriptions of formerly unknown entities. We present the first system that handles all steps that are necessary for this task: schema matching, row clustering, entity creation, and new detection. The evaluation of the system using a manually labeled gold standard shows that it can construct formerly unknown instances and their descriptions from table data with an average F1 score of 0.80. In a second experiment, we apply the system to a large corpus of web tables extracted from the Common Crawl. This experiment allows us to get an overall impression of the potential of web tables for augmenting knowledge bases with long tail entities. The experiment shows that we can augment the DBpedia knowledge base with descriptions of 14 thousand new football players as well as 187 thousand new songs. The accuracy of the facts describing these instances is 0.90.

A subset of the HTML tables on the Web contains relational data. The data in these tables covers a multitude of topics and is thus very useful for complementing or validating cross-domain knowledge bases, such as DBpedia, YAGO, or the Google Knowledge Graph. A large fraction of the data in these knowledge bases is time-dependent, meaning that the correctness of an attribute value depends on a point in time. Fusing data from web tables in order to determine correct values for time-dependent attributes is challenging as most web tables do not contain timestamp information. A possibility to deal with this sparsity is to exploit timestamps which appear in different locations on the web page around the table. But as these timestamps might not apply to the web table value in question, this approach introduces noise. This paper investigates the extent to which the performance of data fusion strategies that rely on voting, PageRank, and Knowledge-Based-Trust can be improved by incorporating noisy and sparse timestamp information. For this, we present a machine-learning-based approach which considers different types of noisy timestamps in the data fusion process, and experiment with propagating timestamp information between web tables in order to overcome sparsity. We evaluate the data fusion strategies using a large public corpus of web tables and a public gold standard of time-dependent attribute values. We find that our methods effectively choose and weigh timestamp information per attribute and reduce sparsity using propagation. By incorporating timestamp information into data fusion strategies that previously did not exploit temporal meta information, we are able to increase F1-measure on average by 5%.

Cross-domain knowledge bases such as DBpedia, YAGO, or the Google Knowledge Graph have gained increasing attention over the last years and are starting to be deployed within various use cases. However, the content of such knowledge bases is far from being complete, far from always being correct, and suffers from deprecation (i.e. population numbers become outdated after some time). Hence, there are efforts to leverage various types of Web data to complement, update and extend such knowledge bases. A source of Web data that potentially provides a very wide coverage are millions of relational HTML tables that are found on the Web. The existing work on using data from Web tables to augment cross-domain knowledge bases reports only aggregated performance numbers. The actual content of the Web tables and the topical areas of the knowledge bases that can be complemented using the tables remain unclear. In this paper, we match a large, publicly available Web table corpus to the DBpedia knowledge base. Based on the matching results, we profile the potential of Web tables for augmenting different parts of cross-domain knowledge bases and report detailed statistics about classes, properties, and instances for which missing values can be filled using Web table data as evidence. In order to estimate the potential quality of the new values, we empirically examine the Local Closed World Assumption and use it to determine the maximal number of correct facts that an ideal data fusion strategy could generate. Using this as ground truth, we compare three data fusion strategies and conclude that knowledge-based trust outperforms PageRank- and voting-based fusion.