Guided Inductive Logic Programming: Cleaning Knowledge Bases with Iterative User Feedback

Domain-oriented knowledge bases (KBs) such as DBpedia and YAGO are largely constructed by applying a set of predefined extraction rules to the semi-structured contents
of Wikipedia articles. Although both of these large-scale KBs achieve very high average
precision values (above 95% for YAGO3), subtle mistakes in a few of the underlying extraction rules may still impose a substantial amount of systematic extraction mistakes for
specific relations. For example, by applying the same regular expressions to extract person names of both Asian and Western nationality, YAGO erroneously swaps most of the
family and given names of Asian person entities. For traditional rule-learning approaches
based on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), it is very difficult to detect these systematic extraction mistakes, since they usually occur only in a relatively small subdomain of
the relations’ arguments. In this paper, we thus propose a guided form of ILP, coined
“GILP”, that iteratively asks for small amounts of user feedback over a given KB to learn
a set of data-cleaning rules that (1) best match the feedback and (2) also generalize to a
larger portion of facts in the KB. We propose both algorithms and respective metrics to
automatically assess the quality of the learned rules with respect to the user feedback.