sift - Knowledge extraction from web data

sift is a toolkit for extracting models of entities and text from a corpus of linked documents.

What can it do?

sift is written in python, runs on Spark and is completely modular.

Out of the box, you can:

• Convert wikipedia articles into json objects without all the mediawiki cruft
• Extract entity relations from wikidata and align them with wikipedia mentions
• Extract plain-text content html and WARC encoded web page crawls
• Model entity popularity, alternative names and relatedness using inlinks
• Preprocess text documents for machine learning pipelines
• Push output into datastores like MongoDB and Redis

Quick Start

Install

pip install git+http://git@github.com/wikilinks/sift.git

Getting Started

To use sift, you'll need some data.

If you'd like to use Wikipedia data, sift includes a helper script for downloading the latest dumps.

Download the latest paritioned Wikipedia dump into the 'latest' directory.

download-wikipedia latest

Once you've got some data, take a look at the sample notebook: sift.ipynb.

Spark

sift uses Spark to process corpora in parallel.

If you'd like to make use of an existing Spark cluster, ensure the SPARK_HOME environment variable is set.

If not, that's fine. sift will prompt you to download and run Spark locally, utilising multiple cores on your system.

Datasets

Web KB datasets built from commoncrawl data are available under a public S3 bucket: s3.amazonaws.com/webkb

• docs-2017 is built from news articles under the CC-NEWS collection from January to June 2017 (sample)
• web-201707 is built from a full web crawl for July 2017 filted to English language pages (sample)

The web collection contains plain-text content, entity mentions and endpoint annotations extracted from 1.5 billion documents with over 4 billion web links. Data is encoded in a simple one-JSON-blob-per-line structure.

For example, the first document in the collection is an article from 2012 describing an upcoming tour by Nicki Minaj:

{
  "_id": "http://1019ampradio.cbslocal.com/2012/11/06/nicki-minaj-promises-man-bits-on-her-upcoming-tour/",
  "text": "Nicki Minaj has had quite the year. Currently in the U.K. on her Reloaded Tour she sat down with London DJ Tim Westwood and her U.K. Barbz for a Q & A session. While Nicki took questions from both Westwood and her fans one answer in particular caused the room to pay attention...",
  "links":[{
      "start": 0,
      "endpoint": 0.6358972797,
      "stop": 11,
      "target": "http://1019ampradio.cbslocal.com/tag/nicki-minaj"
    }, {
      "start": 145,
      "endpoint": 0.2769776554,
      "stop": 160,
      "target": "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnyuhDBcQo0"
  }],
  "mentions":[{
      "start": 0,
      "stop": 11,
      "label": "PERSON"
    }, {
      "start": 53,
      "stop": 57,
      "label": "GPE"
    },
    // truncated
}