Building a Business Knowledge Base by a Supervised Learning and Rule-Based Method

Abstract

Natural Language Question Answering (NLQA) and Prescriptive Analytics (PA) have been identified as innovative, emerging technologies in 2015 by the Gartner group. These technologies require knowledge bases that consist of data that has been extracted from unstructured texts. Every business requires a knowledge base for business analytics as it can enhance companies’ competitiveness in their industry. Most intelligent or analytic services depend a lot upon on knowledge bases. However, building a qualified knowledge base is very time consuming and requires a considerable amount of effort, especially if it is to be manually created. Another problem that occurs when creating a knowledge base is that it will be outdated by the time it is completed and will require constant updating even when it is ready in use. For these reason, it is more advisable to create a computerized knowledge base. This research focuses on building a computerized knowledge base for business using a supervised learning and rule-based method. The method proposed in this paper is based on information extraction, but it has been specialized and modified to extract information related only to a business. The business knowledge base created by our system can also be used for advanced functions such as presenting the hierarchy of technologies and products, and the relations between technologies and products. Using our method, these relations can be expanded and customized according to business requirements.