[Freebase-discuss] Question on related topics

[Paul Houle]

       I'll just add that the problem of finding a good list of "topics 
related to X" in Freebase takes some effort.

      I think the main strategy that Freebase uses to make a list of 
things that share a type (filtered somehow) with the topic that are 
ranked by some kind of importance score.  Something like this is used to 
generate some of the navigation on the top page of Ookaboo,  but it 
doesn't scratch the related topic itch.

      Ookaboo tries to find related topics for things by processing link 
relationships from Wikipedia.  You could try the same thing following 
some other semantic network.  Recall is easy,  precision is hard,  and 
I'm not happy with the results.  It's not hard to make an importance 
score for topics (think PageRank) but importance scoring for 
relationships is hard.  You've got to consider different types of 
relationships ("Is it more important that A was in movie B or more 
important that they were born in city C?"  And also,  if some guy was in 
20 movies,  which one matters the most?  The huge blockbuster that he 
played a bit part in?  Or the low budget movie that he starred in?

      seevl.net actually has something that works well,  but it's for a 
particular domain.  It's processing the semantic relationship network,  
using valuable data chosen from both Wikipedia and Freebase:  almost 
certainly there's some kind of ontology specific knowledge and a scoring 
function involved.  Extending this to "everything" might involve a 
substantial effort to develop a rulebase,  but it would be sweet to find 
some pixie dust that makes it unnecessary.