Google released the Wikilinks Corpus, a collection of 40M disambiguated mentions from 10M web pages to 3M Wikipedia pages. This data can be used to train systems that do entity linking and cross-document co-reference, problems that Google researchers attacked with an earlier version of this data (see Large-Scale Cross-Document Coreference Using Distributed Inference and Hierarchical Models).

You can download the data as ten 175MB files from and some addional tools from UMASS.

This is yet another example of the important role that Wikipedia continues to play in building a common, machine useable semantic substrate for human conceptualizations.

A new Governing magazine article examines a recent study by UMBC professors T.H. Gindling (economics) and Marvin Mandell (public policy) on the economic impact of Maryland’s Dream Act, which extended in-county/in-state tuition at local community colleges and public universities to undocumented immigrants who graduate from Maryland high schools and meet other requirements.

The article notes that 13 states have similar “tuition equity” laws in place and more than a dozen additional states are considering proposals for them. “As state lawmakers think about offering in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants,” suggests J.B. Wogan, “the UMBC study could offer a model for weighing long-term net benefits and costs.”

Summarizing Gindling and Mandell’s report, Wogan writes, “For government at all levels, the total impact would be a net gain of $39.6 million. For society as a whole, they estimate a total economic benefit of $63.6 million.”

See the website of UMBC’s Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR) for the original working paper: “Private and Government Fiscal Costs and Benefits of the Maryland Dream Act.” Coverage of the study has previously appeared on NPR, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Baltimore Sun and other news outlets.

Thomas F. Schaller’s new Baltimore Sun column critiques the concept of “liberal media bias.”

Schaller writes, “Yes: The opinion media generally skew liberal on social issues related to abortion, gay rights, religion and maybe — maybe — guns. But that’s about the extent of it. On issues of war and peace, taxes and spending and government regulation, the corporate-owned American media are frequently anything but liberal.”

Read the full column on the Baltimore Sun website.