A comparison of different strategies for automated semantic document annotation

Abstract

We introduce a framework for automated semantic document annotation that is composed of four processes, namely concept extraction, concept activation, annotation selection, and evaluation. The framework is used to implement and compare different annotation strategies motivated by the literature. For concept extraction, we apply entity detection with semantic hierarchical knowledge bases, Tri-gram, RAKE, and LDA. For concept activation, we compare a set of statistical, hierarchy-based, and graph-based methods. For selecting annotations, we compare top-k as well as kNN. In total, we define 43 different strategies including novel combinations like using graph-based activation with kNN. We have evaluated the strategies using three different datasets of varying size from three scientific disciplines (economics, politics, and computer science) that contain 100, 000 manually labelled documents in total. We obtain the best results on all three datasets by our novel combination of entity detection with graph-based activation (e.g., HITS and Degree) and kNN. For the economic and political science datasets, the best F-measure is .39 and .28, respectively. For the computer science dataset, the maximum F-measure of .33 can be reached. The experiments are the by far largest on scholarly content annotation, which typically are up to a few hundred documents per dataset only.