Learning to Find Interesting Connections in Wikipedia

To help users answer the question, what is the relation between (real world) entities or concepts, we might need to go well beyond the borders of traditional information retrieval systems. In this paper, we explore the possibility of exploiting the Wikipedia link graph as a knowledge base for finding interesting connections between two or more given concepts, described by Wikipedia articles.We use a modified Spreading Activation algorithm to identify connections between input concepts.The main challenge in our approach lies in assessing the strength of a relation defined by a link between articles. We propose two approaches for link weighting and evaluate their results with a user evaluation. Our results show a strong correlation between used weighting methods and user preferences; results indicate that the Wikipedia link graph can be used as valuable semantic resource.