Automatic Wikibook Prototyping via Mining Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia is the world's largest collaboratively edited source of encyclopedic knowledge. Wikibook is a sub-project of Wikipedia that is intended to create a book that can be edited by various contributors, similar to how Wikipedia is composed and edited. Editing a book, however, requires more effort than editing separate articles. Therefore, methods of quickly prototyping a book is a new research issue. In this paper, we investigate how to automatically extract content from Wikipedia and generate a prototype of a Wikibook as a start point for further editing. Applying search technology, our system can retrieve relevant articles from Wikipedia. A table of contents is built automatically and is based on a two-stage searching method. Our experiments show that, given a keyword as the title of a book, our system can generate a table of contents, which can be treated as a prototype of a Wikibook. Such a system can help free textbook editing. We propose an evaluation method based on the comparison of system results to a traditional textbook and show the coverage of our system.