From Google’s Research Blog this afternoon:

Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas [more after the jump]…

 

The database that we are providing was designed for recall. It is large and noisy, incorporating 297,073,139 distinct string-concept pairs, aggregated over 3,152,091,432 individual links, many of them referencing non-existent articles. For technical details, see our paper (to be presented at LREC 2012) and the README file accompanying the data.

We hope that this release will fuel numerous creative applications that haven’t been previously thought of!

Learn more here.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)