Ripple-down rules based open information extraction for the web documents

The World Wide Web contains a massive amount of information in unstructured natural language and obtaining valuable information from informally written Web documents is a major research challenge. One research focus is Open Information Extraction (OIE) aimed at developing relation-independent information extraction. Open Information Extraction systems seek to extract all potential relations from the text rather than extracting few pre-defined relations. Previous machine learning-based Open Information Extraction systems require large volumes of labelled training examples and have trouble handling NLP tools errors caused by Web s informality. These systems used self-supervised learning that generates a labelled training dataset automatically using NLP tools with some heuristic rules. As the number of NLP tool errors increase because of the Web s informality, the self-supervised learning-based labelling technique produces noisy label and critical extraction errors. This thesis presents Ripple-Down Rules based Open Information Extraction (RDROIE) an approach to Open Information Extraction that uses Ripple-Down Rules (RDR) incremental learning technique. The key advantages of this approach are that it does not require labelled training dataset and can handle the freer writing style that occurs in Web documents and can correct errors introduced by NLP tools. The RDROIE system, with minimal low-cost rule addition, outperformed previous OIE systems on informal Web documents

Document management and retrieval for specialised domains : an evolutionary user-based approach

Browsing marked-up documents by traversing hyperlinks has become probably the most important means by which documents are accessed, both via the World Wide Web (WWW) and organisational Intranets. However, there is a pressing demand for document management and retrieval systems to deal appropriately with the massive number of documents available. There are two classes of solution: general search engines, whether for the WWW or an Intranet, which make little use of specific domain knowledge or hand-crafted specialised systems which are costly to build and maintain. The aim of this thesis was to develop a document management and retrieval system suitable for small communities as well as individuals in specialised domains on the Web. The aim was to allow users to easily create and maintain their own organisation of documents while ensuring continual improvement in the retrieval performance of the system as it evolves. The system developed is based on the free annotation of documents by users and is browsed using the concept lattice of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). A number of annotation support tools were developed to aid the annotation process so that a suitable system evolved. Experiments were conducted in using the system to assist in finding staff and student home pages at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales. Results indicated that the annotation tools provided a good level of assistance so that documents were easily organised and a lattice-based browsing structure that evolves in an ad hoc fashion provided good efficiency in retrieval performance. An interesting result suggested that although an established external taxonomy can be useful in proposing annotation terms, users appear to be very selective in their use of terms proposed. Results also supported the hypothesis that the concept lattice of FCA helped take users beyond a narrow search to find other useful documents. In general, lattice-based browsing was considered as a more helpful method than Boolean queries or hierarchical browsing for searching a specialised domain. We conclude that the concept lattice of Formal Concept Analysis, supported by annotation techniques is a useful way of supporting the flexible open management of documents required by individuals, small communities and in specialised domains. It seems likely that this approach can be readily integrated with other developments such as further improvements in search engines and the use of semantically marked-up documents, and provide a unique advantage in supporting autonomous management of documents by individuals and groups - in a way that is closely aligned with the autonomy of the WWW

Combining Knowledge Acquisition and Machine Learning to Control Dynamic Systems

This paper presents an interactive method for building a controller for dynamic systems by using a combination of knowledge acquisition and machine learning techniques. The aim is to build the controller by acquiring the knowledge of an operator skilled at that task. This method has been demonstrated for the skill of learning to fill an aircraft in a flight simulator. The simulator has been augmented to interact with a knowledge acquisition program for creating rules and logging the pilot's actions along with flight information. We have developed a method called Dynamic Ripple Down Rules for knowledge acquisition and Learning Dynamic Ripple Down Rules for automatically generating rules from the logged data. The rules were tested by running the flight simulator in autopilot mode where the autopilot code is implemented by the rules.