WAKA: Webis Assisted Knowledge Graph Authoring

Encyclopedic knowledge graphs, such as Wikidata, host an extensive repository of millions of knowledge statements. However, domain-specific knowledge from fields such as history, physics, or medicine is significantly underrepresented in those graphs. Although few domain-specific knowledge graphs exist (e.g., Pubmed for medicine), developing specialized retrieval applications for many domains still requires constructing knowledge graphs from scratch. To facilitate knowledge graph construction, we introduce WAKA: a Web application that allows domain experts to create knowledge graphs through the medium with which they are most familiar: natural language.

Get started

To use WAKA, you can either use the publicly available service or deploy WAKA locally on your machine.

Use the public service

The public service is available at https://waka.webis.de.

Knowledge graph construction API

In addition to the knowledge graph authoring GUI, there is an API endpoint available to automatically construct knowledge graphs from text.

Domain: POST waka.webis.de/api/v1/kg
Request body:

{"content":  "<your text>"}

Response body:

{
  "text": "<your text>",
  "triples": [
    {"subject":  "<ENTITY_OBJ>", "predicate": "<PROPERTY_OBJ>", "object":  "<ENTITY_OBJ>"},
    {"subject":  "<ENTITY_OBJ>", "predicate": "<PROPERTY_OBJ>", "object":  "<ENTITY_OBJ>"},
    "..."
  ],
  "entities": [
    "<ENTITY_OBJ>",
    "<ENTITY_OBJ>",
    "..."
  ],
  "entity_mentions": [
    "<ENTITY_MENTION_OBJ>",
    "<ENTITY_MENTION_OBJ>",
    "..."
  ]
}

JSON object schemas:

{ // <ENTITY_OBJ>
  "url": "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/...",
  "label": "label in Wikidata",
  "description": "description in Wikidata",
  "score": 1.0,
  "mentions": [
    "<ENTITY_MENTION_OBJ>",
    "..."
  ]
}

{ // <ENTITY_MENTION_OBJ>
  "url": "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/...",
  "label": "label in Wikidata",
  "description": "description in Wikidata",
  "start_idx": 0,
  "end_idx": 20, 
  "text": "mention span content",
  "score": 1.0,
  "e_type": "NER Type"
}

{ // <PROPERTY_OBJ>
  "url": "http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/...",
  "label": "label in Wikidata",
  "description": "description in Wikidata"
}

Example call with curl:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"content\":  \"The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar is a university located in Weimar, Germany.\"}" https://waka.webis.de/api/v1/kg

Deploy service (without Docker)

The local deployment of WAKA requires a Nvidia GPU with at least 10GB of VRAM and a minimum of 20GB RAM.

Installation

Clone this repository and execute the following command (requires build-essential):

make clean install

Run server

make run

After starting the server, WAKA will be available at http://localhost:8000/static/index.html

Deploy service (with Docker)

A prebuilt docker image of WAKA is available. To spawn a container with this image execute the following command (requires nvidia-container-toolkit for GPU support):

docker run --gpus all -P 8000:8000 registry.webis.de/code-lib/public-images/waka:latest

After the container is done setting up, WAKA is available at http://localhost:8000/static/index.html

(Optional) Rebuild Docker image

This only becomes necessary if you make adjustments to the code. Execute the following command to build a new image of WAKA from the project directory.

docker build -t <my-name>:<version> . 

Cite this work

If you make use of WAKA's authoring GUI or the knowledge graph creation algorithm, please cite the following work.

@InProceedings{gohsen:2024a,
  author =                   {Marcel Gohsen and Benno Stein},
  booktitle =                {9th ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2024)},
  doi =                      {10.1145/3627508.3638340},
  isbn =                     {979-8-4007-0434-5/24/03},
  month =                    mar,
  publisher =                {ACM},
  site =                     {Sheffield, United Kingdon},
  title =                    {{Assisted Knowledge Graph Authoring: Human-Supervised Knowledge Graph Construction from Natural Language}},
  year =                     2024
}