Probase: A Probabilistic Taxonomy for Text Understanding

Summary: Universal, probabilistic taxonomy with 2.7M concepts learned from 1.68B web pages; models uncertainty instead of binary edges. Automatic, scalable construction enabling probabilistic text understanding at web scale; a data-management contribution in semantic knowledge modeling. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hdfba06cee5e703e4
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2012
Pagerank: 0.00012956092
Overall Rank: 938 | 93.72%
DOI: 10.1145/2213836.2213891

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Wentao Wu (University of Wisconsin)
2. Hongsong Li (Microsoft)
3. Haixun Wang (Microsoft)
4. Kenny Q. Zhu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{wu_sigmod12,
        title = {{Probase: A Probabilistic Taxonomy for Text Understanding}},
        author = {Wu, Wentao and Li, Hongsong and Wang, Haixun and Zhu, Kenny Q.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '12},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2213836.2213891},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2213836.2213891},
        year = {2012}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 34 of 34 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
440	Efficient Subgraph Matching on Billion Node Graphs	2012	VLDB	0.00018235529
446	Trinity: A Distributed Graph Engine on a Memory Cloud	2013	SIGMOD	0.00018135272
1,417	A Distributed Graph Engine for Web Scale RDF Data	2013	VLDB	0.00010706533
3,042	Knowledge Expansion over Probabilistic Knowledge Bases	2014	SIGMOD	7.7063913e-05
3,777	KBQA: Learning Question Answering over QA Corpora and Knowledge Bases	2017	VLDB	7.0038355e-05
4,420	AliCoCo: Alibaba E-commerce Cognitive Concept Net	2020	SIGMOD	6.5904702e-05
4,590	SlimShot: In-Database Probabilistic Inference for Knowledge Bases	2016	VLDB	6.5029123e-05
5,560	Discovering and Exploring Relations on the Web	2012	VLDB	6.0690691e-05
5,676	Subgraph Matching over Graph Federation	2022	VLDB	6.0246247e-05
5,960	Managing and Mining Large Graphs: Systems and Implementations	2012	SIGMOD	5.9159675e-05
6,147	DREAM: Distributed RDF Engine with Adaptive Query Planner and Minimal Communication	2015	VLDB	5.8560255e-05
6,246	Fine-grained Concept Linking using Neural Networks in Healthcare	2018	SIGMOD	5.8200726e-05
6,345	Generating Preview Tables for Entity Graphs	2016	SIGMOD	5.7901445e-05
6,665	Knowledge Verification for Long-Tail Verticals	2017	VLDB	5.6992391e-05
7,027	An Efficient Publish/Subscribe Index for E-Commerce Databases	2014	VLDB	5.6014394e-05
7,428	Optimizing Index for Taxonomy Keyword Search	2012	SIGMOD	5.5140463e-05
7,728	Scalable Column Concept Determination for Web Tables Using Large Knowledge Bases	2013	VLDB	5.4515436e-05
7,903	Subjective Knowledge Base Construction Powered By Crowdsourcing and Knowledge Base	2018	SIGMOD	5.4135034e-05
8,122	Knowledge Bases in the Age of Big Data Analytics	2014	VLDB	5.3739121e-05
8,276	Symmetric Weighted First-Order Model Counting	2015	PODS	5.3475867e-05
8,669	Anytime Approximation in Probabilistic Databases via Scaled Dissociations	2019	SIGMOD	5.2754888e-05
9,310	Ontological Pathfinding: Mining First-Order Knowledge from Large Knowledge Bases	2016	SIGMOD	5.1843936e-05
9,357	Semantic SPARQL Similarity Search Over RDF Knowledge Graphs	2016	VLDB	5.1746049e-05
10,047	Hierarchical Entity Resolution using an Oracle	2022	SIGMOD	5.0786422e-05
11,752	Probabilistic Reasoning at Scale: Trigger Graphs to the Rescue	2023	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,138	GIANT: Scalable Creation of a Web-scale Ontology	2020	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,327	Building Structured Databases of Factual Knowledge from Massive Text Corpora	2017	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,392	Automatic Entity Recognition and Typing in Massive Text Data	2016	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,434	Looking at Everything in Context	2015	CIDR	4.9605343e-05
12,470	ConfSeer: Leveraging Customer Support Knowledge Bases for Automated Misconfiguration Detection	2015	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
12,479	Annotating Database Schemas to Help Enterprise Search	2015	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
12,509	Mining Latent Entity Structures from Massive Unstructured and Interconnected Data	2014	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,582	Knowledge Harvesting in the Big-Data Era	2013	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,613	IBminer: A Text Mining Tool for Constructing and Populating InfoBox Databases and Knowledge Bases	2013	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
65	Freebase: A Collaboratively Created Graph Database For Structuring Human Knowledge	2008	SIGMOD	0.0003826876
5,960	Managing and Mining Large Graphs: Systems and Implementations	2012	SIGMOD	5.9159675e-05
7,428	Optimizing Index for Taxonomy Keyword Search	2012	SIGMOD	5.5140463e-05
12,729	Web Scale Taxonomy Cleansing	2011	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

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1	5,047	Querying Probabilistic Information Extraction	2010	VLDB
2	5,779	Question Answering Over Knowledge Graphs: Question Understanding Via Template Decomposition	2018	VLDB
3	5,283	Using taxonomy, discriminants, and signatures for navigating in text databases	1997	VLDB
4	4,566	Structured Annotations of Web Queries	2010	SIGMOD
5	12,327	Building Structured Databases of Factual Knowledge from Massive Text Corpora	2017	SIGMOD
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