Coldstart is a task in the NIST Text Analysis Conference’s Knowledge Base Population suite that combines entity linking and slot filling to populate an empty knowledge base using a predefined ontology for the facts and relations. This paper describes a system developed by the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins University for the 2014 Coldstart task.

Tim Finin, Paul McNamee, Dawn Lawrie, James Mayfield and Craig Harman, Hot Stuff at Cold Start: HLTCOE participation at TAC 2014, 7th Text Analysis Conference, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Nov. 2014.

The JHU HLTCOE participated in the Cold Start task in this year’s Text Analysis Conference Knowledge Base Population evaluation. This is our third year of participation in the task, and we continued our research with the KELVIN system. We submitted experimental variants that explore use of forward-chaining inference, slightly more aggressive entity clustering, refined multiple within-document conference, and prioritization of relations extracted from news sources.