This thesis focuses on entity and fact extraction from the web. Different knowledge representations and techniques for information extraction are discussed before the design for a knowledge extraction system, called WebKnox, is introduced. The main contribution of this thesis is the trust ranking of extracted facts with a self-supervised learning loop and the extraction system with its composition of known and refined extraction algorithms. The used techniques show an improvement in precision and recall in most of the matters for entity and fact extractions compared to the chosen baseline approaches.

The search for information about entities, such as people or movies, plays an increasingly important role on the Web. This information is still scattered across many Web pages, making it more time consuming for a user to find all relevant information about an entity. This thesis describes techniques to extract entities and information about these entities from the Web, such as facts, opinions, questions and answers, interactive multimedia objects, and events. The findings of this thesis are that it is possible to create a large knowledge base automatically using a manually-crafted ontology. The precision of the extracted information was found to be between 75–90 % (facts and entities respectively) after using assessment algorithms. The algorithms from this thesis can be used to create such a knowledge base, which can be used in various research fields, such as question answering, named entity recognition, and information retrieval.

The search for information about entities, such as people or movies, plays an increasingly important role on the Web. This information is still scattered across many Web pages, making it more time consuming for a user to find all relevant information about an entity. This thesis describes techniques to extract entities and information about these entities from the Web, such as facts, opinions, questions and answers, interactive multimedia objects, and events. The findings of this thesis are that it is possible to create a large knowledge base automatically using a manually-crafted ontology. The precision of the extracted information was found to be between 75–90 % (facts and entities respectively) after using assessment algorithms. The algorithms from this thesis can be used to create such a knowledge base, which can be used in various research fields, such as question answering, named entity recognition, and information retrieval.

This thesis focuses on entity and fact extraction from the web. Different knowledge representations and techniques for information extraction are discussed before the design for a knowledge extraction system, called WebKnox, is introduced. The main contribution of this thesis is the trust ranking of extracted facts with a self-supervised learning loop and the extraction system with its composition of known and refined extraction algorithms. The used techniques show an improvement in precision and recall in most of the matters for entity and fact extractions compared to the chosen baseline approaches.