Xiaoxin Yin, Wenzhao Tan
Internet Services Research Center (ISRC), Microsoft Research
Access it at http://lepton.research.microsoft.com/facto/
Facto is a fact lookup engine that aims at answering user questions aiming at facts about entities. It has three distinguishing features:
¡¤ Fully automated: No human labeling is needed.
¡¤ Domain independent: Facto handles data from all over the web.
¡¤ Self-curated: Facto uses data from the different web sites to predict the trustworthiness of data.
Facto identifies attribute-value tables on the web, and extracts information from them. It also extracts the main entities of web pages, which is combined with the attribute-values to form a large database. Equivalent entities and equivalent attributes are identified from the data.
When receiving a user query, Facto decomposes it into all possible combinations of entity name and attribute, and tries to match them in its database. It retrieves answers for each possible combination, and aggregates the data to select the best answer.