Reusing Ontologies to Enrich Semantically User Content in Web2.0: A Case Study on Folksonomies

Semantic Web and Web2.0 emerged during the past decade promising to achieve new frontiers for the Web. On the one hand, the Semantic Web is an interlinked web of data, supported by ontological semantics and allowing for intelligent applications such as semantic search and integration of heterogeneous content across systems and applications. On the other hand, Web2.0 represents the new technologies and paradigms that revolutionised the user engagement in content creation and introduced novel means towards social interaction. Bridging the gap between Web2.0 and the Semantic Web has been proposed as a means to better manage and interact with the large amounts of user contributed content, which is a new challenge for Web2.0. This thesis focuses on a popular paradigm of Web2.0, folksonomies. In particular, we investigate the semantic enrichment of folksonomy tagspaces by reusing ontologies available in the Semantic Web. We identify the need for methods that automatically apply semantic descriptions to user generated content without requiring user intervention or alteration of the current tagging paradigm. We use an iterative approach in order to identify the characteristics of folksonomies and the attributes of knowledge sources that influence the semantic enrichment of tagspaces. We build on the results of our experimental studies to implement a folksonomy enrichment algorithm, that given an input tagspace, automatically creates a semantic structure that describes the meaning and relations of tags. We introduce measures for the evaluation of enriched tagspaces and finally, we propose a search algorithm that exploits the semantic structures to improve folksonomy search

Information search and similarity based on Web 2.0 and semantic technologies

The World Wide Web provides a huge amount of information described in natural language at the current society’s disposal. Web search engines were born from the necessity of finding a particular piece of that information. Their ease of use and their utility have turned these engines into one of the most used web tools at a daily basis. To make a query, users just have to introduce a set of words - keywords - in natural language and the engine answers with a list of ordered resources which contain those words. The order is given by ranking algorithms. These algorithms use basically two types of features: dynamic and static factors. The dynamic factor has into account the query; that is, those documents which contain the keywords used to describe the query are more relevant for that query. The hyperlinks structure among documents is an example of a static factor of most current algorithms. For example, if most documents link to a particular document, this document may have more relevance than others because it is more popular. Even though currently there is a wide consensus on the good results that the majority of web search engines provides, these tools still suffer from some limitations, basically 1) the loneliness of the searching activity itself; and 2) the simple recovery process, based mainly on offering the documents that contains the exact terms used to describe the query. Considering the first problem, there is no doubt in the lonely and time-consuming process of searching relevant information in the World Wide Web. There are thousands of users out there that repeat previously executed queries, spending time in taking decisions of which documents are relevant or not; decisions that may have been taken previously and that may be do the job for similar or identical queries for other users. Considering the second problem, the textual nature of the current Web makes the reasoning capability of web search engines quite restricted; queries and web resources are described in natural language that, in some cases, can lead to ambiguity or other semantic-related difficulties. Computers do not know text; however, if semantics is incorporated to the text, meaning and sense is incorporated too. This way, queries and web resources will not be mere sets of terms, but lists of well-defined concepts. This thesis proposes a semantic layer, known as Itaca, which joins simplicity and effectiveness in order to endow with semantics both the resources stored in the World Wide Web and the queries used by users to find those resources. This is achieved through collaborative annotations and relevance feedback made by the users themselves, which describe both the queries and the web resources by means of Wikipedia concepts. Itaca extends the functional capabilities of current web search engines, providing a new ranking algorithm without dispensing traditional ranking models. Experiments show that this new architecture offers more precision in the final results obtained, keeping the simplicity and usability of the web search engines existing so far. Its particular design as a layer makes feasible its inclusion to current engines in a simple way.Internet pone a disposición de la sociedad una enorme cantidad de información descrita en lenguaje natural. Los buscadores web nacieron de la necesidad de encontrar un fragmento de información entre tanto volumen de datos. Su facilidad de manejo y su utilidad los han convertido en herramientas de uso diario entre la población. Para realizar una consulta, el usuario sólo tiene que introducir varias palabras clave en lenguaje natural y el buscador responde con una lista de recursos que contienen dichas palabras, ordenados en base a algoritmos de ranking. Estos algoritmos usan dos tipos de factores básicos: factores dinámicos y estáticos. El factor dinámico tiene en cuenta la consulta en sí; es decir, aquellos documentos donde estén las palabras utilizadas para describir la consulta serán más relevantes para dicha consulta. La estructura de hiperenlaces en los documentos electrónicos es un ejemplo de factor estático. Por ejemplo, si muchos documentos enlazan a otro documento, éste último documento podrá ser más relevante que otros. Si bien es cierto que actualmente hay consenso entre los buenos resultados de estos buscadores, todavía adolecen de ciertos problemas, destacando 1) la soledad en la que un usuario realiza una consulta; y 2) el modelo simple de recuperación, basado en ver si un documento contiene o no las palabras exactas usadas para describir la consulta. Con respecto al primer problema, no hay duda de que navegar en busca de cierta información relevante es una práctica solitaria y que consume mucho tiempo. Hay miles de usuarios ahí fuera que repiten sin saberlo una misma consulta, y las decisiones que toman muchos de ellos, descartando la información irrelevante y quedándose con la que realmente es útil, podrían servir de guía para otros muchos. Con respecto al segundo, el carácter textual de la Web actual hace que la capacidad de razonamiento en los buscadores se vea limitada, pues las consultas y los recursos están descritos en lenguaje natural que en ocasiones da origen a la ambigüedad. Los equipos informáticos no comprenden el texto que se incluye. Si se incorpora semántica al lenguaje, se incorpora significado, de forma que las consultas y los recursos electrónicos no son meros conjuntos de términos, sino una lista de conceptos claramente diferenciados. La presente tesis desarrolla una capa semántica, Itaca, que dota de significado tanto a los recursos almacenados en la Web como a las consultas que pueden formular los usuarios para encontrar dichos recursos. Todo ello se consigue a través de anotaciones colaborativas y de relevancia realizadas por los propios usuarios, que describen tanto consultas como recursos electrónicos mediante conceptos extraídos de Wikipedia. Itaca extiende las características funcionales de los buscadores web actuales, aportando un nuevo modelo de ranking sin tener que prescindir de los modelos actualmente en uso. Los experimentos demuestran que aporta una mayor precisión en los resultados finales, manteniendo la simplicidad y usabilidad de los buscadores que se conocen hasta ahora. Su particular diseño, a modo de capa, hace que su incorporación a buscadores ya existentes sea posible y sencilla.Programa Oficial de Posgrado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Asunción Gómez Pérez.- Secretario: Mario Muñoz Organero.- Vocal: Anselmo Peñas Padill

Contextual Authority Tagging: Expertise Location via Social Labeling

This study investigates the possibility of a group of people making explicit their tacit knowledge about one another's areas of expertise. Through a design consisting of a modified Delphi Study, group members are asked to label both their own and each others' areas of expertise over the course of five rounds. Statistical analysis and qualitative evaluation of 10 participating organizations suggest they were successful and that, with simple keywords, group members can convey the salient areas of expertise of their colleagues to a degree that is deemed similar'' and of high quality by both third parties and those being evaluated. More work needs to be done to make this information directly actionable, but the foundational aspects have been identified. In a world with a democratization of voices from all around and increasing demands on our time and attention, this study suggests that simple, aggregated third-party expertise evaluations can augment our ongoing struggle for quality information source selection. These evaluations can serve as loose credentials when more expensive or heavyweight reputation cues may not be viable

Web and Philosophy, Why and What For?: Proceedings of the WWW2012 conference workshop PhiloWeb 2012

ISSN: 1613-0073International audienceProceedings of PhiloWeb 2012, workshop at WWW 2012, on the philosophy of the Web

Semantic Interaction in Web-based Retrieval Systems : Adopting Semantic Web Technologies and Social Networking Paradigms for Interacting with Semi-structured Web Data

Existing web retrieval models for exploration and interaction with web data do not take into account semantic information, nor do they allow for new forms of interaction by employing meaningful interaction and navigation metaphors in 2D/3D. This thesis researches means for introducing a semantic dimension into the search and exploration process of web content to enable a significantly positive user experience. Therefore, an inherently dynamic view beyond single concepts and models from semantic information processing, information extraction and human-machine interaction is adopted. Essential tasks for semantic interaction such as semantic annotation, semantic mediation and semantic human-computer interaction were identified and elaborated for two general application scenarios in web retrieval: Web-based Question Answering in a knowledge-based dialogue system and semantic exploration of information spaces in 2D/3D

개인화 검색 및 파트너쉽 선정을 위한 사용자 프로파일링

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 치의과학과, 2014. 2. 김홍기.The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new. - Socrates The automatic identification of user intention is an important but highly challenging research problem whose solution can greatly benefit information systems. In this thesis, I look at the problem of identifying sources of user interests, extracting latent semantics from it, and modelling it as a user profile. I present algorithms that automatically infer user interests and extract hidden semantics from it, specifically aimed at improving personalized search. I also present a methodology to model user profile as a buyer profile or a seller profile, where the attributes of the profile are populated from a controlled vocabulary. The buyer profiles and seller profiles are used in partnership match. In the domain of personalized search, first, a novel method to construct a profile of user interests is proposed which is based on mining anchor text. Second, two methods are proposed to builder a user profile that gather terms from a folksonomy system where matrix factorization technique is explored to discover hidden relationship between them. The objective of the methods is to discover latent relationship between terms such that contextually, semantically, and syntactically related terms could be grouped together, thus disambiguating the context of term usage. The profile of user interests is also analysed to judge its clustering tendency and clustering accuracy. Extensive evaluation indicates that a profile of user interests, that can correctly or precisely disambiguate the context of user query, has a significant impact on the personalized search quality. In the domain of partnership match, an ontology termed as partnership ontology is proposed. The attributes or concepts, in the partnership ontology, are features representing context of work. It is used by users to lay down their requirements as buyer profiles or seller profiles. A semantic similarity measure is defined to compute a ranked list of matching seller profiles for a given buyer profile.1 Introduction 1 1.1 User Profiling for Personalized Search . . . . . . . . 9 1.1.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 1.1.2 Research Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 1.2 User Profiling for Partnership Match . . . . . . . . 18 1.2.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 1.2.2 Research Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 1.3 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 1.4 System Architecture - Personalized Search . . . . . 29 1.5 System Architecture - Partnership Match . . . . . . 31 1.6 Organization of this Dissertation . . . . . . . . . . 32 2 Background 35 2.1 Introduction to Social Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 2.2 Matrix Decomposition Methods . . . . . . . . . . . 40 2.3 User Interest Profile For Personalized Web Search Non Folksonomy based . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 2.4 User Interest Profile for Personalized Web Search Folksonomy based . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 2.5 Personalized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 2.6 Partnership Match . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 3 Mining anchor text for building User Interest Profile: A non-folksonomy based personalized search 56 3.1 Exclusively Yours' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 3.1.1 Infer User Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 3.1.2 Weight Computation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 3.1.3 Query Expansion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 3.2 Exclusively Yours' Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 3.3 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 3.3.1 DataSet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 3.3.2 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 3.3.3 User Profile Efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 3.3.4 Personalized vs. Non-Personalized Results . 76 3.4 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 4 Matrix factorization for building Clustered User Interest Profile: A folksonomy based personalized search 82 4.1 Aggregating tags from user search history . . . . . 86 4.2 Latent Semantics in UIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 4.2.1 Computing the tag-tag Similarity matrix . . 90 4.2.2 Tag Clustering to generate svdCUIP and modSvdCUIP 98 4.3 Personalized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 4.4 Experimental Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 4.4.1 Data Set and Experiment Methodology . . . 103 4.4.1.1 Custom Data Set and Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 4.4.1.2 AOL Query Data Set and Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 4.4.1.3 Experiment set up to estimate the value of k and d . . . . . . . . . . 107 4.4.1.4 Experiment set up to compare the proposed approaches with other approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 4.4.2 Experiment Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 4.4.2.1 Clustering Tendency . . . . . . . . 111 4.4.2.2 Determining the value for dimension parameter, k, for the Custom Data Set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 4.4.2.3 Determining the value of distinctness parameter, d, for the Custom data set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 4.4.2.4 CUIP visualization . . . . . . . . . 117 4.4.2.5 Determining the value of the dimension reduction parameter k for the AOL data set. . . . . . . . . . . . 119 4.4.2.6 Determining the value of distinctness parameter, d, for the AOL data set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 4.4.2.7 Time to generate svdCUIP and modSvd-CUIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 4.4.2.8 Comparison of the svdCUIP, modSvd-CUIP, and tfIdfCUIP for different classes of queries . . . . . . . . . . 123 4.4.2.9 Comparing all five methods - Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 4.4.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 5 User Profiling for Partnership Match 133 5.1 Supplier Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 5.2 Criteria for Partnership Establishment . . . . . . . 140 5.3 Partnership Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 5.4 Case Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 5.4.1 Buyer Profile and Seller Profile . . . . . . . 153 5.4.2 Semantic Similarity Measure . . . . . . . . . 155 5.5 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 5.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 6 Conclusion 164 6.1 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 6.1.1 Degree of Personalization . . . . . . . . . . . 167 6.1.2 Filter Bubble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 6.1.3 IPR issues in Partnership Match . . . . . . . 169 Bibliography 170 Appendices 193 .1 Pairs of Query and target URL . . . . . . . . . . . 194 .2 Examples of Expanded Queries . . . . . . . . . . . 197 .3 An example of svdCUIP, modSvdCUIP, tfIdfCUIP 198Docto

Automatically Acquiring A Semantic Network Of Related Concepts

We describe the automatic acquisition of a semantic network in which over 7,500 of the most frequently occurring nouns in the English language are linked to their semantically related concepts in the WordNet noun ontology. Relatedness between nouns is discovered automatically from lexical co-occurrence in Wikipedia texts using a novel adaptation of an information theoretic inspired measure. Our algorithm then capitalizes on salient sense clustering among these semantic associates to automatically disambiguate them to their corresponding WordNet noun senses (i.e., concepts). The resultant concept-to-concept associations, stemming from 7,593 target nouns, with 17,104 distinct senses among them, constitute a large-scale semantic network with 208,832 undirected edges between related concepts. Our work can thus be conceived of as augmenting the WordNet noun ontology with RelatedTo links. The network, which we refer to as the Szumlanski-Gomez Network (SGN), has been subjected to a variety of evaluative measures, including manual inspection by human judges and quantitative comparison to gold standard data for semantic relatedness measurements. We have also evaluated the network’s performance in an applied setting on a word sense disambiguation (WSD) task in which the network served as a knowledge source for established graph-based spreading activation algorithms, and have shown: a) the network is competitive with WordNet when used as a stand-alone knowledge source for WSD, b) combining our network with WordNet achieves disambiguation results that exceed the performance of either resource individually, and c) our network outperforms a similar resource, WordNet++ (Ponzetto & Navigli, 2010), that has been automatically derived from annotations in the Wikipedia corpus. iii Finally, we present a study on human perceptions of relatedness. In our study, we elicited quantitative evaluations of semantic relatedness from human subjects using a variation of the classical methodology that Rubenstein and Goodenough (1965) employed to investigate human perceptions of semantic similarity. Judgments from individual subjects in our study exhibit high average correlation to the elicited relatedness means using leave-one-out sampling (r = 0.77, σ = 0.09, N = 73), although not as high as average human correlation in previous studies of similarity judgments, for which Resnik (1995) established an upper bound of r = 0.90 (σ = 0.07, N = 10). These results suggest that human perceptions of relatedness are less strictly constrained than evaluations of similarity, and establish a clearer expectation for what constitutes human-like performance by a computational measure of semantic relatedness. We also contrast the performance of a variety of similarity and relatedness measures on our dataset to their performance on similarity norms and introduce our own dataset as a supplementary evaluative standard for relatedness measures

Domain-sensitive topic management in a modular conversational agent framework

Flexible nontask-oriented conversational agents require content for generating responses and mechanisms that serve them for choosing appropriate topics to drive interactions with users. Structured knowledge resources such as ontologies are a useful mechanism to represent conversational topics. In order to develop the topic-management mechanism, we addressed a number of research issues related to the development of the required infrastructure. First, we address the issue of heavy human involvement in the construction of knowledge resources by proposing a four-stage automatic process for building domain-specific ontologies. These ontologies are comprised of a set of subtaxonomies obtained from WordNet, an electronic dictionary that arranges concepts in a hierarchical structure. The roots of these subtaxonomies are obtained from Wikipedia’s article links or wikilinks; this under the hypothesis that wikilinks provide a sense of relatedness from the article consulted to their destinations. With the knowledge structures defined, we explore the possibility of using semantic relatedness over these domain-specific ontologies as a mean to propose conversational topics in a coherent manner. For this, we examine different automatic measures of semantic relatedness to determine which correlates with human judgements obtained from an automatically constructed dataset. We then examine the question of whether domain information influences the human perception of semantic relatedness in a way that automatic measures do not replicate. This study requires us to design and implement a process to build datasets with pairs of concepts as those used in the literature to evaluate automatic measures of semantic relatedness, but with domain information associated. This study shows, to statistical significance, that existing measures of semantic relatedness do not take domain into consideration, and that including domain as a factor in this calculation can enhance the agreement of automatic measures with human assessments. Finally, this artificially constructed measure is integrated into the Toy’s dialogue manager, in order to help in the real-time selection of conversational topics. This supplements our result that the use of semantic relatedness seems to produce more coherent and interesting topic transitions than existing mechanisms