Wikipedia Mining for Huge Scale Japanese Association Thesaurus Construction

Wikipedia, a huge scale Web-based dictionary, is an impressive corpus for knowledge extraction. We already proved that Wikipedia can be used for constructing an English association thesaurus and our link structure mining method is significantly effective for this aim. However, we want to find out how we can apply this method to other languages and what the requirements, differences and characteristics are. Nowadays, Wikipedia supports more than 250 languages such as English, German, French, Polish and Japanese. Among Asian languages, the Japanese Wikipedia is the largest corpus in Wikipedia. In this research, therefore, we analyzed all Japanese articles in Wikipedia and constructed a huge scale Japanese association thesaurus. After constructing the thesaurus, we realized that it shows several impressive characteristics depending on language and culture.