Machine reading is a long-standing goal of AI and NLP. In recent years, tremendous progress has been made in developing machine learning approaches for many of its subtasks such as parsing, information extraction, and question answering. However, existing end-to-end solutions typically require substantial amount of human efforts (e.g., labeled data and/or manual engineering), and are not well poised for Web-scale knowledge acquisition. In this paper, we propose a unifying approach for machine reading by bootstrapping from the easiest extractable knowledge and conquering the long tail via a self-supervised learning process. This self-supervision is powered by joint inference based on Markov logic, and is made scalable by leveraging hierarchical structures and coarse-to-fine inference. Researchers at the University of Washington have taken the first steps in this direction. Our existing work explores the wide spectrum of this vision and shows its promise.

State-of-the-art bootstrapping systems rely on expert-crafted semantic constraints such as negative categories to reduce semantic drift. Unfortunately, their use introduces a substantial amount of supervised knowledge. We present the Relation Guided Bootstrapping (RGB) algorithm, which simultaneously extracts lexicons and open relationships to guide lexicon growth and reduce semantic drift. This removes the necessity for manually crafting

This paper describes the way in which personal relationships between main characters in 19 th century Swedish prose fiction can be identified using information guided by named entities, provided by a entity recognition system adapted to the 19 th century Swedish language characteristics. Interpersonal relation extraction is based on the context between two relevant, identified person entities. The relationships extraction process also utilizes the content of on-line available lexical semantic resources (suitable vocabularies) and fairly standard context matching methods that provide a basic mechanism for identifying a wealth of interpersonal relations. Such relations can hopefully aid the reader of a 19thcentury Swedish literary work to better understand its content and plot, and get a bird’s eye view on the landscape of the core story. 1