Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool (CIQUEST)

This report describes a three-year project (2000-03) undertaken in the Information Studies Department at The University of Sheffield and funded by Resource, The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. The overall aim of the research was to provide user support for query formulation and reformulation in searching large-scale textual resources including those of the World Wide Web. More specifically the objectives were: to investigate and evaluate methods for the automatic generation and organisation of concepts derived from retrieved document sets, based on statistical methods for term weighting; and to conduct user-based evaluations on the understanding, presentation and retrieval effectiveness of concept structures in selecting candidate terms for interactive query expansion. The TREC test collection formed the basis for the seven evaluative experiments conducted in the course of the project. These formed four distinct phases in the project plan. In the first phase, a series of experiments was conducted to investigate further techniques for concept derivation and hierarchical organisation and structure. The second phase was concerned with user-based validation of the concept structures. Results of phases 1 and 2 informed on the design of the test system and the user interface was developed in phase 3. The final phase entailed a user-based summative evaluation of the CiQuest system. The main findings demonstrate that concept hierarchies can effectively be generated from sets of retrieved documents and displayed to searchers in a meaningful way. The approach provides the searcher with an overview of the contents of the retrieved documents, which in turn facilitates the viewing of documents and selection of the most relevant ones. Concept hierarchies are a good source of terms for query expansion and can improve precision. The extraction of descriptive phrases as an alternative source of terms was also effective. With respect to presentation, cascading menus were easy to browse for selecting terms and for viewing documents. In conclusion the project dissemination programme and future work are outlined

A Context Centric Model for building a Knowledge advantage Machine Based on Personal Ontology Patterns

Throughout the industrial era societal advancement could be attributed in large part to introduction a plethora of electromechanical machines all of which exploited a key concept known as Mechanical Advantage. In the post-industrial era exploitation of knowledge is emerging as the key enabler for societal advancement. With the advent of the Internet and the Web, while there is no dearth of knowledge, what is lacking is an efficient and practical mechanism for organizing knowledge and presenting it in a comprehensible form appropriate for every context. This is the fundamental problem addressed by my dissertation.;We begin by proposing a novel architecture for creating a Knowledge Advantage Machine (KaM), one which enables a knowledge worker to bring to bear a larger amount of knowledge to solve a problem in a shorter time. This is analogous to an electromechanical machine that enables an industrial worker to bring to bear a large amount of power to perform a task thus improving worker productivity. This work is based on the premise that while a universal KaM is beyond the realm of possibility, a KaM specific to a particular type of knowledge worker is realizable because of the limited scope of his/her personal ontology used to organize all relevant knowledge objects.;The proposed architecture is based on a society of intelligent agents which collaboratively discover, markup, and organize relevant knowledge objects into a semantic knowledge network on a continuing basis. This in-turn is exploited by another agent known as the Context Agent which determines the current context of the knowledge worker and makes available in a suitable form the relevant portion of the semantic network. In this dissertation we demonstrate the viability and extensibility of this architecture by building a prototype KaM for one type of knowledge worker such as a professor

From Text to Knowledge with Graphs: modelling, querying and exploiting textual content

This paper highlights the challenges, current trends, and open issues related to the representation, querying and analytics of content extracted from texts. The internet contains vast text-based information on various subjects, including commercial documents, medical records, scientific experiments, engineering tests, and events that impact urban and natural environments. Extracting knowledge from this text involves understanding the nuances of natural language and accurately representing the content without losing information. This allows knowledge to be accessed, inferred, or discovered. To achieve this, combining results from various fields, such as linguistics, natural language processing, knowledge representation, data storage, querying, and analytics, is necessary. The vision in this paper is that graphs can be a well-suited text content representation once annotated and the right querying and analytics techniques are applied. This paper discusses this hypothesis from the perspective of linguistics, natural language processing, graph models and databases and artificial intelligence provided by the panellists of the DOING session in the MADICS Symposium 2022

Implementing Semantic Search to a Case Management System

The amount of information in today’s information society is immense, which creates a need for intuitive and effective search functionalities and applications. In addition to openly available search applications, organizations need internal search functionalities for optimizing their information management. This thesis provides an implementation suggestion for JoutseNet semantic search application. JoutseNet is a case management system used by the authorities and the employees of the city of Turku. Thesis begins by introducing some relevant fundamentals of natural language processing and search engines. Literature review is utilized to find semantic search implementation methods from previous research papers. Case JoutseNet is introduced with some background information on the case management process and with a brief user research and examination on the current state of the system. Learnings from the fundamental guidelines and conducted research are combined to implement the search application. After the implementation documentation, guidelines for optimizing and testing the application are given. The value and performance of the implementation is yet to be determined because the production data of the JoutseNet system could not be used for research purposes. A comprehensive suggestion is provided, but further research and development is still needed before delivering it to the production environment

Construindo grafos de conhecimento utilizando documentos textuais para análise de literatura científica

Orientador: Julio Cesar dos ReisDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: O número de publicações científicas que pesquisadores tem que ler vem aumento nos últimos anos. Consequentemente, dentre várias opções, é difícil para eles identificarem documentos relevantes relacionados aos seus estudos. Ademais, para entender como um campo científico é organizado, e para estudar o seu estado da arte, pesquisadores geralmente se baseiam em artigos de revisão de uma área. Estes artigos podem estar indisponíveis ou desatualizados dependendo do tema estudado. Usualmente, pesquisadores têm que realizar esta árdua tarefa de pesquisa fundamental manualmente. Pesquisas recentes vêm desenvolvendo mecanismos para auxiliar outros pesquisadores a entender como campos científicos são estruturados. Entretanto, estes mecanismos são focados exclusivamente em recomendar artigos relevantes para os pesquisadores ou os auxiliar em entender como um ramo da ciência é organizado ao nível de publicação. Desta forma, estes métodos limitam o entendimento sobre o ramo estudado, não permitindo que interessados estudem os conceitos e relações abstratas que compõe um ramo da ciência e as suas subáreas. Esta dissertação de mestrado propõe um framework para estruturar, analisar, e rastrear a evolução de um campo científico no nível dos seus conceitos. Ela primeiramente estrutura o campo científico como um grafo-de-conhecimento utilizando os seus conceitos como vértices. A seguir, ela automaticamente identifica as principais subáreas do campo estudado, extrai as suas frases-chave, e estuda as suas relações. Nosso framework representa o campo científico em diferentes períodos do tempo. Esta dissertação compara estas representações, e identifica como as subáreas do campo estudado evoluiram no decorrer dos anos. Avaliamos cada etapa do nosso framework representando e analisando dados científicos provenientes de diferentes áreas de conhecimento em casos de uso. Nossas descobertas indicam o sucesso em detectar resultados similares em diferentes casos de uso, indicando que nossa abordagem é aplicável à diferentes domínios da ciência. Esta pesquisa também contribui com uma aplicação com interface web para auxiliar pesquisadores a utilizarem nosso framework de forma gráfica. Ao utilizar nossa aplicação, pesquisadores podem ter uma análise geral de como um campo científico é estruturado e como ele evoluiAbstract: The amount of publications a researcher must absorb has been increasing over the last years. Consequently, among so many options, it is hard for them to identify interesting documents to read related to their studies. Researchers usually search for review articles to understand how a scientific field is organized and to study its state of the art. This option can be unavailable or outdated depending on the studied area. Usually, they have to do such laborious task of background research manually. Recent researches have developed mechanisms to assist researchers in understanding the structure of scientific fields. However, those mechanisms focus on recommending relevant articles to researchers or supporting them in understanding how a scientific field is organized considering documents that belong to it. These methods limit the field understanding, not allowing researchers to study the underlying concepts and relations that compose a scientific field and its sub-areas. This Ms.c. thesis proposes a framework to structure, analyze, and track the evolution of a scientific field at a concept level. Given a set of textual documents as research papers, it first structures a scientific field as a knowledge graph using its detected concepts as vertices. Then, it automatically identifies the field's main sub-areas, extracts their keyphrases, and studies their relations. Our framework enables to represent the scientific field in distinct time-periods. It allows to compare its representations and identify how the field's areas changed over time. We evaluate each step of our framework representing and analyzing scientific data from distinct fields of knowledge in case studies. Our findings indicate the success in detecting the sub-areas based on the generated graph from natural language documents. We observe similar outcomes in the different case studies by indicating our approach applicable to distinct domains. This research also contributes with a web-based software tool that allows researchers to use the proposed framework graphically. By using our application, researchers can have an overview analysis of how a scientific field is structured and how it evolvedMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computação2013/08293-7 ; 2017/02325-5FAPESPCAPE

Approaches to Automatic Text Structuring

Structured text helps readers to better understand the content of documents. In classic newspaper texts or books, some structure already exists. In the Web 2.0, the amount of textual data, especially user-generated data, has increased dramatically. As a result, there exists a large amount of textual data which lacks structure, thus making it more difficult to understand. In this thesis, we will explore techniques for automatic text structuring to help readers to fulfill their information needs. Useful techniques for automatic text structuring are keyphrase identification, table-of-contents generation, and link identification. We improve state of the art results for approaches to text structuring on several benchmark datasets. In addition, we present new representative datasets for users’ everyday tasks. We evaluate the quality of text structuring approaches with regard to these scenarios and discover that the quality of approaches highly depends on the dataset on which they are applied. In the first chapter of this thesis, we establish the theoretical foundations regarding text structuring. We describe our findings from a user survey regarding web usage from which we derive three typical scenarios of Internet users. We then proceed to the three main contributions of this thesis. We evaluate approaches to keyphrase identification both by extracting and assigning keyphrases for English and German datasets. We find that unsupervised keyphrase extraction yields stable results, but for datasets with predefined keyphrases, additional filtering of keyphrases and assignment approaches yields even higher results. We present a de- compounding extension, which further improves results for datasets with shorter texts. We construct hierarchical table-of-contents of documents for three English datasets and discover that the results for hierarchy identification are sufficient for an automatic system, but for segment title generation, user interaction based on suggestions is required. We investigate approaches to link identification, including the subtasks of identifying the mention (anchor) of the link and linking the mention to an entity (target). Approaches that make use of the Wikipedia link structure perform best, as long as there is sufficient training data available. For identifying links to sense inventories other than Wikipedia, approaches that do not make use of the link structure outperform the approaches using existing links. We further analyze the effect of senses on computing similarities. In contrast to entity linking, where most entities can be discriminated by their name, we consider cases where multiple entities with the same name exist. We discover that similarity de- pends on the selected sense inventory. To foster future evaluation of natural language processing components for text structuring, we present two prototypes of text structuring systems, which integrate techniques for automatic text structuring in a wiki setting and in an e-learning setting with eBooks

Driving the Technology Value Stream by Analyzing App Reviews

An emerging feature of mobile application software is the need to quickly produce new versions to solve problems that emerged in previous versions. This helps adapt to changing user needs and preferences. In a continuous software development process, the user reviews collected by the apps themselves can play a crucial role to detect which components need to be reworked. This paper proposes a novel framework that enables software companies to drive their technology value stream based on the feedback (or reviews) provided by the end-users of an application. The proposed end-to-end framework exploits different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks to best understand the needs and goals of the end users. We also provide a thorough and in-depth analysis of the framework, the performance of each of the modules, and the overall contribution in driving the technology value stream. An analysis of reviews with sixteen popular Android Play Store applications from various genres over a long period of time provides encouraging evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference Formal Approaches to South Slavic and Balkan languages

Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference Formal Approaches to South Slavic and Balkan Languages publishes 17 papers that were presented at the conference organised in Dubrovnik, Croatia, 4-6 Octobre 2010

Robust Dialog Management Through A Context-centric Architecture

This dissertation presents and evaluates a method of managing spoken dialog interactions with a robust attention to fulfilling the human user’s goals in the presence of speech recognition limitations. Assistive speech-based embodied conversation agents are computer-based entities that interact with humans to help accomplish a certain task or communicate information via spoken input and output. A challenging aspect of this task involves open dialog, where the user is free to converse in an unstructured manner. With this style of input, the machine’s ability to communicate may be hindered by poor reception of utterances, caused by a user’s inadequate command of a language and/or faults in the speech recognition facilities. Since a speech-based input is emphasized, this endeavor involves the fundamental issues associated with natural language processing, automatic speech recognition and dialog system design. Driven by ContextBased Reasoning, the presented dialog manager features a discourse model that implements mixed-initiative conversation with a focus on the user’s assistive needs. The discourse behavior must maintain a sense of generality, where the assistive nature of the system remains constant regardless of its knowledge corpus. The dialog manager was encapsulated into a speech-based embodied conversation agent platform for prototyping and testing purposes. A battery of user trials was performed on this agent to evaluate its performance as a robust, domain-independent, speech-based interaction entity capable of satisfying the needs of its users