"A spousal relation begins with a deletion of engage and ends with an addition of divorce": learning state changing verbs from Wikipedia revision history

Learning to determine when the timevarying facts of a Knowledge Base (KB) have to be updated is a challenging task. We propose to learn state changing verbs from Wikipedia edit history. When a state-changing event, such as a marriage or death, happens to an entity, the infobox on the entity's Wikipedia page usually gets updated. At the same time, the article text may be updated with verbs either being added or deleted to reflect the changes made to the infobox. We use Wikipedia edit history to distantly supervise a method for automatically learning verbs and state changes. Additionally, our method uses constraints to effectively map verbs to infobox changes. We observe in our experiments that when state-changing verbs are added or deleted from an entity's Wikipedia page text, we can predict the entity's infobox updates with 88% precision and 76% recall. One compelling application of our verbs is to incorporate them as triggers in methods for updating existing KBs, which are currently mostly static.