USFD at KBP 2011: Entity Linking, Slot Filling and Temporal Bounding

This paper describes the University of Sheffield's entry in the 2011 TAC KBP entity linking and slot filling tasks. We chose to participate in the monolingual entity linking task, the monolingual slot filling task and the temporal slot filling tasks. We set out to build a framework for experimentation with knowledge base population. This framework was created, and applied to multiple KBP tasks. We demonstrated that our proposed framework is effective and suitable for collaborative development efforts, as well as useful in a teaching environment. Finally we present results that, while very modest, provide improvements an order of magnitude greater than our 2010 attempt.