Cross-lingual information retrieval and delivery using community mobile networks

Much of the Web content is in English and accessing this content is difficult for non-English speaking users because of the language barrier. Hence, there is a great need for providing applications and interfaces in one's own language to tap into this vast knowledge reserve. In addition, access to the Internet is still a major problem in developing countries because of the "digital divide" and hand held devices such as PDAs and Mobile Phones are seen as enablers in bridging this gap. However, displaying cross-lingual content on these mobile devices is a non trivial task and there is a great need for robust mechanisms and infrastructure for content delivery in different languages on the fly. This paper presents an overall approach for cross-lingual content specification and delivery for computing/mobile devices. It helps mitigate the language barrier by providing cross-lingual search and retrieval capabilities for accessing the Web content

Query-Time Data Integration

Today, data is collected in ever increasing scale and variety, opening up enormous potential for new insights and data-centric products. However, in many cases the volume and heterogeneity of new data sources precludes up-front integration using traditional ETL processes and data warehouses. In some cases, it is even unclear if and in what context the collected data will be utilized. Therefore, there is a need for agile methods that defer the effort of integration until the usage context is established. This thesis introduces Query-Time Data Integration as an alternative concept to traditional up-front integration. It aims at enabling users to issue ad-hoc queries on their own data as if all potential other data sources were already integrated, without declaring specific sources and mappings to use. Automated data search and integration methods are then coupled directly with query processing on the available data. The ambiguity and uncertainty introduced through fully automated retrieval and mapping methods is compensated by answering those queries with ranked lists of alternative results. Each result is then based on different data sources or query interpretations, allowing users to pick the result most suitable to their information need. To this end, this thesis makes three main contributions. Firstly, we introduce a novel method for Top-k Entity Augmentation, which is able to construct a top-k list of consistent integration results from a large corpus of heterogeneous data sources. It improves on the state-of-the-art by producing a set of individually consistent, but mutually diverse, set of alternative solutions, while minimizing the number of data sources used. Secondly, based on this novel augmentation method, we introduce the DrillBeyond system, which is able to process Open World SQL queries, i.e., queries referencing arbitrary attributes not defined in the queried database. The original database is then augmented at query time with Web data sources providing those attributes. Its hybrid augmentation/relational query processing enables the use of ad-hoc data search and integration in data analysis queries, and improves both performance and quality when compared to using separate systems for the two tasks. Finally, we studied the management of large-scale dataset corpora such as data lakes or Open Data platforms, which are used as data sources for our augmentation methods. We introduce Publish-time Data Integration as a new technique for data curation systems managing such corpora, which aims at improving the individual reusability of datasets without requiring up-front global integration. This is achieved by automatically generating metadata and format recommendations, allowing publishers to enhance their datasets with minimal effort. Collectively, these three contributions are the foundation of a Query-time Data Integration architecture, that enables ad-hoc data search and integration queries over large heterogeneous dataset collections

Finding co-solvers on Twitter, with a little help from Linked Data

In this paper we propose a method for suggesting potential collaborators for solving innovation challenges online, based on their competence, similarity of interests and social proximity with the user. We rely on Linked Data to derive a measure of semantic relatedness that we use to enrich both user profiles and innovation problems with additional relevant topics, thereby improving the performance of co-solver recommendation. We evaluate this approach against state of the art methods for query enrichment based on the distribution of topics in user profiles, and demonstrate its usefulness in recommending collaborators that are both complementary in competence and compatible with the user. Our experiments are grounded using data from the social networking service Twitter.com

Improving average ranking precision in user searches for biomedical research datasets

Availability of research datasets is keystone for health and life science study reproducibility and scientific progress. Due to the heterogeneity and complexity of these data, a main challenge to be overcome by research data management systems is to provide users with the best answers for their search queries. In the context of the 2016 bioCADDIE Dataset Retrieval Challenge, we investigate a novel ranking pipeline to improve the search of datasets used in biomedical experiments. Our system comprises a query expansion model based on word embeddings, a similarity measure algorithm that takes into consideration the relevance of the query terms, and a dataset categorisation method that boosts the rank of datasets matching query constraints. The system was evaluated using a corpus with 800k datasets and 21 annotated user queries. Our system provides competitive results when compared to the other challenge participants. In the official run, it achieved the highest infAP among the participants, being +22.3% higher than the median infAP of the participant's best submissions. Overall, it is ranked at top 2 if an aggregated metric using the best official measures per participant is considered. The query expansion method showed positive impact on the system's performance increasing our baseline up to +5.0% and +3.4% for the infAP and infNDCG metrics, respectively. Our similarity measure algorithm seems to be robust, in particular compared to Divergence From Randomness framework, having smaller performance variations under different training conditions. Finally, the result categorization did not have significant impact on the system's performance. We believe that our solution could be used to enhance biomedical dataset management systems. In particular, the use of data driven query expansion methods could be an alternative to the complexity of biomedical terminologies

Improving document representation by accumulating relevance feedback : the relevance feedback accumulation (RFA) algorithm

Document representation (indexing) techniques are dominated by variants of the term-frequency analysis approach, based on the assumption that the more occurrences a term has throughout a document the more important the term is in that document. Inherent drawbacks associated with this approach include: poor index quality, high document representation size and the word mismatch problem. To tackle these drawbacks, a document representation improvement method called the Relevance Feedback Accumulation (RFA) algorithm is presented. The algorithm provides a mechanism to continuously accumulate relevance assessments over time and across users. It also provides a document representation modification function, or document representation learning function that gradually improves the quality of the document representations. To improve document representations, the learning function uses a data mining measure called support for analyzing the accumulated relevance feedback. Evaluation is done by comparing the RFA algorithm to other four algorithms. The four measures used for evaluation are (a) average number of index terms per document; (b) the quality of the document representations assessed by human judges; (c) retrieval effectiveness; and (d) the quality of the document representation learning function. The evaluation results show that (1) the algorithm is able to substantially reduce the document representations size while maintaining retrieval effectiveness parameters; (2) the algorithm provides a smooth and steady document representation learning function; and (3) the algorithm improves the quality of the document representations. The RFA algorithm\u27s approach is consistent with efficiency considerations that hold in real information retrieval systems. The major contribution made by this research is the design and implementation of a novel, simple, efficient, and scalable technique for document representation improvement

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Conversational AI Assistant Using Artificial Neural Networks: Implementation of a contextual chatbot framework in a Point-of-Sale system

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Business AnalyticsArtificial intelligence is changing the way how businesses are affronting their day-to-day difficulties. Chatbots are the perfect demonstration of how simple tasks and queries such as customer support or sales metrics and reporting could be solved without human intervention. This project introduced a task-oriented chatbot framework for Spanish language in a Point-Of-Sale webpage. We applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as NER and evaluated two supervised learning methods: (i) an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and (ii) a Support Vector Machines (SVM) model to create a contextualized chatbot that classifies the user’s intention in a text conversation, allowing bidirectional human-to-machine communication. These intents could go from simple chitchatting to detailed reports, always providing a natural flow in conversation. The results using an augmented and balanced corpus suggested that ANN model performed statistically better than SVM. Additionally, a real-word scenario with a small-talk survey made to five users gave positive feedback about the quality of predictions. Finally, a software architecture using a PaaS computing service and an API framework was proposed to implement this dialog system in further works

A multi-INT semantic reasoning framework for intelligence analysis support

Lockheed Martin Corp. has funded research to generate a framework and methodology for developing semantic reasoning applications to support the discipline oflntelligence Analysis. This chapter outlines that framework, discusses how it may be used to advance the information sharing and integrated analytic needs of the Intelligence Community, and suggests a system I software architecture for such applications