A Study of Relation Annotation in Business Environments Using Web Mining

Relation annotation (RA) is a process of marking up relations among a set of entities identified from a plain text. RA is important to enterprise applications due to its capability of revealing semantics in business environments. However, RA in business environment is different from that in news domain because the entities involved in the relations in business domain often not just refer to entities like People or Locations, and many business entities still could not be identified by existing entity identification tools. In this paper, we explore RA in business environment using web mining techniques, and propose the Relation Annotation Platform in Business Environments (RAPBE), which can automatically help information workers by annotating business relations in enterprise setting. We evaluated RAPBE using two sample relations that are common in business domain -- COMPANY-LOCATION and COMPANY-PRODUCT. Our experiment results demonstrate the usefulness of RAPBE in relation annotation, and also show that the best method for marking up relations of the entities identifiable by existing entity identification tools is Frequency Weight method, whereas Distant Weight is the best when some entities involved in RA cannot be identified by the information extraction tools.