KnowUREnvironment: An Automated Knowledge Graph for Climate Change and Environmental Issues

Md Saiful Islam (University of Rochester), Adiba Proma (University of Rochester), Yilin Zhou (University of Rochester), Syeda Nahida Akter (Carnegie Mellon University), Caleb Wohn (University of Rochester) and Ehsan Hoque (University of Rochester)

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Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Despite climate change being one of the greatest threats to humanity, many people are still in denial or lack motivation for appropriate action. A structured source of knowledge can help increase public awareness while also helping crucial natural language understanding tasks such as information retrieval, question answering, and recommendation systems. We introduce KnowUREnvironment – a knowledge graph for climate change and related environmental issues, extracted from the scientific literature. We automatically identify 210,230 domain-specific entities/concepts and encode how these concepts are interrelated with 411,860 RDF triples backed up with evidence from the literature, without using any supervision or human intervention. Human evaluation shows our extracted triples are syntactically and factually correct (81.69% syntactic correctness and 75.85% precision). The proposed framework can be easily extended to any domain that can benefit from such a knowledge graph.