COCO-EX: A Tool for Linking Concepts from Texts to ConceptNet

In this paper we present COCO-EX, a tool for Extracting Concepts from texts and linking them to the ConceptNet knowledge graph. COCO-EX extracts meaningful concepts from natural language texts and maps them to conjunct concept nodes in ConceptNet, utilizing the maximum of relational information stored in the ConceptNet knowledge graph. COCOEX takes into account the challenging characteristics of ConceptNet, namely that – unlike conventional knowledge graphs – nodes are represented as non-canonicalized, free-form text. This means that i) concepts are not normalized; ii) they often consist of several different, nested phrase types; and iii) many of them are uninformative, over-specific, or misspelled. A commonly used shortcut to circumvent these problems is to apply string matching. We compare COCO-EX to this method and show that COCO-EX enables the extraction of meaningful, important rather than overspecific or uninformative concepts, and allows to assess more relational information stored in the knowledge graph.