Constructing Structured Information Networks from Massive Text Corpora

In today's computerized and information-based society, text data is rich but messy. People are soaked with vast amounts of natural-language text data, ranging from news articles, social media post, advertisements, to a wide range of textual information from various domains (medical records, corporate reports). To turn such massive unstructured text data into actionable knowledge, one of the grand challenges is to gain an understanding of the factual information (e.g., entities, attributes, relations, events) in the text. In this tutorial, we introduce data-driven methods to construct structured information networks (where nodes are different types of entities attached with attributes, and edges are different relations between entities) for text corpora of different kinds (especially for massive, domain-specific text corpora) to represent their factual information. We focus on methods that are minimally-supervised, domain-independent, and language-independent for fast network construction across various application domains (news, web, biomedical, reviews). We demonstrate on real datasets including news articles, scientific publications, tweets and reviews how these constructed networks aid in text analytics and knowledge discovery at a large scale.