CN-StartEnd: A Chinese Event Base Recording Start and End for Everything

Abstract

Start and end are very important attributes in knowledge graphs. The entities or relations in a knowledge graph often have their validity periods represented by start timestamps and end timestamps. For example, Obama’s birthday is the start time of his life and the departure time is the end of his president’s career. We need to refer to the start timestamps or end timestamps when dealing with temporal tasks such as temporal question answering. The existing Chinese knowledge graphs, with popular examples including CN-DBpedia, Zhishi.me and PKU-PIE, contain some unprocessed start timestamps and end timestamps for their entities. While in Chinese, a large number of descriptions about the beginning or end of entities, relations and states lie in events. In this paper we introduce our work in constructing a Chinese event base which focus on start-events and end-events. We extract more than 3 million event-temporal cases from infoboxes and natural texts of Chinese encyclopedias. After selection and matching, these event-temporal cases are reconstructed into a large-scale knowledge base that incorporates over 2.3 million start-events and 700 thousand end-events. Events describing the same object and match our start-end templates are merged into more than 150 thousand start-end pairs. Dumps for CN-StartEnd are available at: http://eventkg.cn/cn_StartEnd.