Improving Natural Language Inference Using External Knowledge in the Science Questions Domain

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is fundamental to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications including semantic search and question answering. The NLI problem has gained significant attention thanks to the release of large scale, challenging datasets. Present approaches to the problem largely focus on learning-based methods that use only textual information in order to classify whether a given premise entails, contradicts, or is neutral with respect to a given hypothesis. Surprisingly, the use of methods based on structured knowledge -- a central topic in artificial intelligence -- has not received much attention vis-a-vis the NLI problem. While there are many open knowledge bases that contain various types of reasoning information, their use for NLI has not been well explored. To address this, we present a combination of techniques that harness knowledge graphs to improve performance on the NLI problem in the science questions domain. We present the results of applying our techniques on text, graph, and text-to-graph based models, and discuss implications for the use of external knowledge in solving the NLI problem. Our model achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on the NLI problem over the SciTail science questions dataset.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 5 table

An information retrieval approach to ontology mapping

In this paper, we present a heuristic mapping method and a prototype mapping system that support the process of semi-automatic ontology mapping for the purpose of improving semantic interoperability in heterogeneous systems. The approach is based on the idea of semantic enrichment, i.e., using instance information of the ontology to enrich the original ontology and calculate similarities between concepts in two ontologies. The functional settings for the mapping system are discussed and the evaluation of the prototype implementation of the approach is reported. \ud \u

An affect-based video retrieval system with open vocabulary querying

Content-based video retrieval systems (CBVR) are creating new search and browse capabilities using metadata describing significant features of the data. An often overlooked aspect of human interpretation of multimedia data is the affective dimension. Incorporating affective information into multimedia metadata can potentially enable search using this alternative interpretation of multimedia content. Recent work has described methods to automatically assign affective labels to multimedia data using various approaches. However, the subjective and imprecise nature of affective labels makes it difficult to bridge the semantic gap between system-detected labels and user expression of information requirements in multimedia retrieval. We present a novel affect-based video retrieval system incorporating an open-vocabulary query stage based on WordNet enabling search using an unrestricted query vocabulary. The system performs automatic annotation of video data with labels of well defined affective terms. In retrieval annotated documents are ranked using the standard Okapi retrieval model based on open-vocabulary text queries. We present experimental results examining the behaviour of the system for retrieval of a collection of automatically annotated feature films of different genres. Our results indicate that affective annotation can potentially provide useful augmentation to more traditional objective content description in multimedia retrieval

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Domain-specific lexicon generation for emotion detection from text.

Emotions play a key role in effective and successful human communication. Text is popularly used on the internet and social media websites to express and share emotions, feelings and sentiments. However useful applications and services built to understand emotions from text are limited in effectiveness due to reliance on general purpose emotion lexicons that have static vocabulary and sentiment lexicons that can only interpret emotions coarsely. Thus emotion detection from text calls for methods and knowledge resources that can deal with challenges such as dynamic and informal vocabulary, domain-level variations in emotional expressions and other linguistic nuances. In this thesis we demonstrate how labelled (e.g. blogs, news headlines) and weakly-labelled (e.g. tweets) emotional documents can be harnessed to learn word-emotion lexicons that can account for dynamic and domain-specific emotional vocabulary. We model the characteristics of realworld emotional documents to propose a generative mixture model, which iteratively estimates the language models that best describe the emotional documents using expectation maximization (EM). The proposed mixture model has the ability to model both emotionally charged words and emotion-neutral words. We then generate a word-emotion lexicon using the mixture model to quantify word-emotion associations in the form of a probability vectors. Secondly we introduce novel feature extraction methods to utilize the emotion rich knowledge being captured by our word-emotion lexicon. The extracted features are used to classify text into emotion classes using machine learning. Further we also propose hybrid text representations for emotion classification that use the knowledge of lexicon based features in conjunction with other representations such as n-grams, part-of-speech and sentiment information. Thirdly we propose two different methods which jointly use an emotion-labelled corpus of tweets and emotion-sentiment mapping proposed in psychology to learn word-level numerical quantification of sentiment strengths over a positive to negative spectrum. Finally we evaluate all the proposed methods in this thesis through a variety of emotion detection and sentiment analysis tasks on benchmark data sets covering domains from blogs to news articles to tweets and incident reports

Automatic domain ontology extraction for context-sensitive opinion mining

Automated analysis of the sentiments presented in online consumer feedbacks can facilitate both organizations’ business strategy development and individual consumers’ comparison shopping. Nevertheless, existing opinion mining methods either adopt a context-free sentiment classification approach or rely on a large number of manually annotated training examples to perform context sensitive sentiment classification. Guided by the design science research methodology, we illustrate the design, development, and evaluation of a novel fuzzy domain ontology based contextsensitive opinion mining system. Our novel ontology extraction mechanism underpinned by a variant of Kullback-Leibler divergence can automatically acquire contextual sentiment knowledge across various product domains to improve the sentiment analysis processes. Evaluated based on a benchmark dataset and real consumer reviews collected from Amazon.com, our system shows remarkable performance improvement over the context-free baseline