Analysis on the applications of Wikipedia in Chinese information processing

As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has the advantages of large amount of information, wide coverage and timely updating. The Wikipedia is constructed and shared by all users. Currently, with comparison to the applications of other language resources such as WordNet and Hownet in natural language processing (NLP), Wikipedia is seldom used in NLP by researchers. In this paper, firstly, the main characteristics of Wikipedia are analyzed. Then its applications in areas of NLP are introduced, especially in Chinese information processing. Finally, after a more detailed comparison among Wikipedia, WordNet and HowNet, we conclude that Wikipedia will become a very important language resource and be applied to Chinese information processing by more and more researchers.