---
title: "DBpedia: A Multilingual Cross-domain Knowledge Base — Mendes 2012"
description: "This LREC'12 paper presents DBpedia, which converts Wikipedia editions in 97 languages into one multilingual… 22 references, cited by 32 papers here."
authors: ["Pablo Mendes", "Max Jakob", "Christian Bizer"]
year: 2012
venue: "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L12-1323/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mendes-2012-dbpedia-multilingual-cross-domain-knowledge/"
---
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# DBpedia: A Multilingual Cross-domain Knowledge Base

**Authors:** Pablo Mendes, [Max Jakob](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/max-jakob/) and [Christian Bizer](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/christian-bizer/) · **Year:** 2012 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L12-1323/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L12-1323.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2251958415)

**Citations:** 145 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [32](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mendes-2012-dbpedia-multilingual-cross-domain-knowledge/cited-by/) in our library, of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Wikipedia holds a vast amount of world knowledge, but mostly as free text and inconsistently structured templates, which makes it hard to use directly in NLP. This LREC'12 paper presents DBpedia, which converts Wikipedia editions in 97 languages into one multilingual, cross-domain knowledge base. An open-source extraction framework gives every page a URI and stores infobox fields, categories, page links and other structured content as RDF triples. Volunteer communities then map differing infobox templates and attribute names, across languages, onto a single shared DBpedia Ontology. As a result, facts from different language editions can be merged, and smaller editions can be enriched from larger ones. Beyond the core resource, the authors describe auxiliary data sets built for computational linguistics: Lexicalization, Topic Signatures, Thematic (Topical) Concepts and Grammatical Gender. SPARQL examples show how these support entity linking, disambiguation, question answering (QALD-1), slot filling, relation extraction and query auto-suggestion. All data can be downloaded freely, and part of it can be queried online. This makes DBpedia a ready-made reference resource for language technology.

## Key points
- Titles and abstracts cover up to 97 languages, and infobox facts come from 15 editions. Mapping communities existed for 23 languages as of March 2012, and English, Greek, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish had mapped templates covering about 80% of template usage.
- The DBpedia Ontology has 320 classes and 1,650 properties. It describes 3.64M things, of which 1.83M are classified, including 416,000 persons and 526,000 places.
- The Lexicalization Data Set draws on titles, redirects, disambiguation pages and link anchor texts. It holds 6.6M scores, given as p(uri|sf), p(sf|uri), PMI and p(uri), and it feeds DBpedia Spotlight.
- Lexicalization statistics:
  - Roughly 4.4M surface forms point to only one resource, while 392,000 can refer to more than one.
  - Average ambiguity is 1.22 overall and 2.52 among ambiguous forms.
  - Each resource has about 2.32 alternative names on average.
- The Grammatical Gender data set assigns gender by counting English pronouns, requiring a 200% frequency margin. Setting the minimum pronoun count to 5, 4 or 3 covers 68%, 75% or 81% of persons, and roughly 85% of assigned persons are labelled male.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [AI & machine learning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/ai/)

Topics: [🌍 Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multilingual-nlp/) · [🕸️ Knowledge graphs & ontologies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/knowledge-graphs/)

## Institutions

- [Freie Universität Berlin](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/freie-universitat-berlin/) — University, Berlin, Germany · 8 works · 273 citations

## Cite

Cite as: Pablo Mendes, Max Jakob and Christian Bizer. 2012. DBpedia: A Multilingual Cross-domain Knowledge Base. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{mendes2012dbpedia,
  title = {{DBpedia: A Multilingual Cross-domain Knowledge Base}},
  author = {Pablo Mendes, Max Jakob and Christian Bizer},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.63317/4b94v6njihis},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4b94v6njihis}
}
```

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## References

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