65,551 research outputs found
A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web
Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with
innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a
robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information
overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based
information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue
and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the
Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the
Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open
knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open
knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention
is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well
as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic
Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in
information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then
reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future
prospects
Revamping question answering with a semantic approach over world knowledge
Classic textual question answering (QA) approaches that
rely on statistical keyword relevance scoring without exploiting semantic content are useful to a certain extent, but are limited to questions answered by a small text excerpt. With the maturation of Wikipedia and with upcoming projects like DBpedia, we feel that nowadays QA can adopt a deeper, semantic approach to the task, where answers can be inferred using knowledge bases to overcome the limitations of textual QA approaches. In GikiCLEF, a QA-flavoured evaluation task, the best performing systems followed a semantic approach. In this paper, we present our motivations for preferring semantic approaches to QA over textual approaches, with Wikipedia serving as a raw knowledge source
Knowledge-rich Image Gist Understanding Beyond Literal Meaning
We investigate the problem of understanding the message (gist) conveyed by
images and their captions as found, for instance, on websites or news articles.
To this end, we propose a methodology to capture the meaning of image-caption
pairs on the basis of large amounts of machine-readable knowledge that has
previously been shown to be highly effective for text understanding. Our method
identifies the connotation of objects beyond their denotation: where most
approaches to image understanding focus on the denotation of objects, i.e.,
their literal meaning, our work addresses the identification of connotations,
i.e., iconic meanings of objects, to understand the message of images. We view
image understanding as the task of representing an image-caption pair on the
basis of a wide-coverage vocabulary of concepts such as the one provided by
Wikipedia, and cast gist detection as a concept-ranking problem with
image-caption pairs as queries. To enable a thorough investigation of the
problem of gist understanding, we produce a gold standard of over 300
image-caption pairs and over 8,000 gist annotations covering a wide variety of
topics at different levels of abstraction. We use this dataset to
experimentally benchmark the contribution of signals from heterogeneous
sources, namely image and text. The best result with a Mean Average Precision
(MAP) of 0.69 indicate that by combining both dimensions we are able to better
understand the meaning of our image-caption pairs than when using language or
vision information alone. We test the robustness of our gist detection approach
when receiving automatically generated input, i.e., using automatically
generated image tags or generated captions, and prove the feasibility of an
end-to-end automated process
Entropy and Graph Based Modelling of Document Coherence using Discourse Entities: An Application
We present two novel models of document coherence and their application to
information retrieval (IR). Both models approximate document coherence using
discourse entities, e.g. the subject or object of a sentence. Our first model
views text as a Markov process generating sequences of discourse entities
(entity n-grams); we use the entropy of these entity n-grams to approximate the
rate at which new information appears in text, reasoning that as more new words
appear, the topic increasingly drifts and text coherence decreases. Our second
model extends the work of Guinaudeau & Strube [28] that represents text as a
graph of discourse entities, linked by different relations, such as their
distance or adjacency in text. We use several graph topology metrics to
approximate different aspects of the discourse flow that can indicate
coherence, such as the average clustering or betweenness of discourse entities
in text. Experiments with several instantiations of these models show that: (i)
our models perform on a par with two other well-known models of text coherence
even without any parameter tuning, and (ii) reranking retrieval results
according to their coherence scores gives notable performance gains, confirming
a relation between document coherence and relevance. This work contributes two
novel models of document coherence, the application of which to IR complements
recent work in the integration of document cohesiveness or comprehensibility to
ranking [5, 56]
On-the-fly Table Generation
Many information needs revolve around entities, which would be better
answered by summarizing results in a tabular format, rather than presenting
them as a ranked list. Unlike previous work, which is limited to retrieving
existing tables, we aim to answer queries by automatically compiling a table in
response to a query. We introduce and address the task of on-the-fly table
generation: given a query, generate a relational table that contains relevant
entities (as rows) along with their key properties (as columns). This problem
is decomposed into three specific subtasks: (i) core column entity ranking,
(ii) schema determination, and (iii) value lookup. We employ a feature-based
approach for entity ranking and schema determination, combining deep semantic
features with task-specific signals. We further show that these two subtasks
are not independent of each other and can assist each other in an iterative
manner. For value lookup, we combine information from existing tables and a
knowledge base. Using two sets of entity-oriented queries, we evaluate our
approach both on the component level and on the end-to-end table generation
task.Comment: The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and
Development in Information Retrieva
Identifying Web Tables - Supporting a Neglected Type of Content on the Web
The abundance of the data in the Internet facilitates the improvement of
extraction and processing tools. The trend in the open data publishing
encourages the adoption of structured formats like CSV and RDF. However, there
is still a plethora of unstructured data on the Web which we assume contain
semantics. For this reason, we propose an approach to derive semantics from web
tables which are still the most popular publishing tool on the Web. The paper
also discusses methods and services of unstructured data extraction and
processing as well as machine learning techniques to enhance such a workflow.
The eventual result is a framework to process, publish and visualize linked
open data. The software enables tables extraction from various open data
sources in the HTML format and an automatic export to the RDF format making the
data linked. The paper also gives the evaluation of machine learning techniques
in conjunction with string similarity functions to be applied in a tables
recognition task.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure
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