Named entity network based on wikipedia

Named Entities (NEs) play an important role in many natural language and speech processing tasks. A resource that identifies relations between NEs could potentially be very useful. We present such automatically generated knowledge resource from Wikipedia, Named Entity Network (NE-NET), that provides a list of related Named Entities (NEs) and the degree of relation for any given NE. Unlike some manually built knowledge resource, NE-NET has a wide coverage consisting of 1.5 million NEs represented as nodes of a graph with 6.5 million arcs relating them. NE-NET also provides the ranks of the related NEs using a simple ranking function that we propose. In this paper, we present NE-NET and our experiments showing how NE-NET can be used to improve the retrieval of spoken (Broadcast News) and text documents.