Amharic DBpedia Chapter: A Knowledge Graph for a Low-Resource Language
Abstract: DBpedia is a community-driven project that extracts structured knowledge from Wikipedia via language-specific chapters. We present the first steps toward the Amharic DBpedia chapter by extending the DBpedia Extraction Framework (DEF) to support Amharic Wikipedia, including language-specific components such as Ethiopian date parsers, an Ethiopian–Gregorian calendar converter, an Arabic–Ge’ez number converter, and Amharic template mappings, together with automated extraction pipelines and the publication of the resulting knowledge graph through a live website, DBpedia Databus collection, and query endpoints. For mapping, we evaluate the zero-shot NLLB-200 translation model on Amharic infobox property names, achieving a BLEU score of 45.31. For ontology alignment, we link mapped properties to DBpedia ontology properties across 58 DBpedia classes and benchmark multilingual encoders with Amharic support, including Afro-XLM-R Base, XLM-R Base, and Amharic fine-tuned mBERT. The fine-tuned Afro-XLM-R model achieves 92.1% Top-10 accuracy and strong ranking performance, as measured by Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). We release all resources developed for the Amharic DBpedia chapter, including the Ethiopian date parser, Ethiopian–Gregorian calendar converter, Arabic–Geʽez numeral converter, Amharic template mappings, automated extraction workflows, and the resulting Amharic DBpedia knowledge graph with public access via the DBpedia Databus collection, Tentris query endpoint, and the live website at am.dbpedia.org.
Show BibTeX
@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/lrec/AlemayehuTBZZUN26,
author = {Hizkiel Mitiku Alemayehu and
Tilahun Abedissa Taffa and
Meti Adane Bayissa and
Andargachew Asfaw Zewge and
Hamada M. Zahera and
Ricardo Usbeck and
Axel{-}Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo},
editor = {Stelios Piperidis and
N{\'{u}}ria Bel and
Henk van den Heuvel and
Nancy Ide and
Simon Krek and
Antonio Toral},
title = {Amharic DBpedia Chapter: {A} Knowledge Graph for a Low-Resource Language},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference,
{LREC} 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, May 13-15, 2026},
pages = {7894--7904},
publisher = {{ELRA} Language Resource Association / {ACL}},
year = {2026},
url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/536jn6g8rjnx},
doi = {10.63317/536JN6G8RJNX},
timestamp = {Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:44:18 +0200},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/lrec/AlemayehuTBZZUN26.bib},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}