CLOCQ: A Toolkit for Fast and Easy Access to Knowledge Bases

Abstract

Curated knowledge bases (KBs) store vast amounts of factual world knowledge, and are therefore ubiquitous in many information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP) applications like question answering, named entity disambiguation, or knowledge exploration. Despite that, accessing information from complete knowledge bases is often a daunting task. Researchers and practitioners typically have crisp use cases in mind, for which standard querying interfaces can be overly complex and inefficient. We aim to bridge this gap, and release a public toolkit that provides functionalities for common KB access use cases, and make it available via a public API. Experiments show efficiency improvements over existing KB interfaces for various important functionalities.