GTE-Cluster: A Temporal Search Interface for Implicit Temporal Queries

In this work, we aim to define the temporal intents of implicit tempora

Time and information retrieval: Introduction to the special issue

The Special Issue of Information Processing and Management includes research papers on the intersection between time and information retrieval. In 'Evaluating Document Filtering Systems over Time', Tom Kenter and Krisztian Balog propose a time-aware way of measuring a system's performance at filtering documents. Manika Kar, SeAa7acute;rgio Nunes and Cristina Ribeiro present interesting methods for summarizing changes in dynamic text collections over time in their paper 'Summarization of Changes in Dynamic Text Collection using Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model.' Hideo Joho, Adam Jatowt and Roi Blanco report on the temporal information searching behaviour of users and their strategies for dealing with searches that have a temporal nature in 'Temporal Information Searching Behaviour and Strategies', a user study. In controlled settings, thirty participants are asked to perform searches on an array of topics on the web to find information related to particular time scopes. Adam Jatowt, Ching-man Au Yeung and Katsumi Tanaka present a 'Generic Method for Detecting Content Time of Documents'. The authors propose several methods for estimating the focus time of documents, i.e. the time a document's content refers to. Xujian Zhao, Peiquan Jin and Lihua Yue present an approach to determining the time of the underlying topic or event in their article entitled 'Discovering Topic Time from Web News'

From Word to Sense Embeddings: A Survey on Vector Representations of Meaning

Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning. We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency, which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses (in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to different domains and compositionality.Comment: 46 pages, 8 figures. Published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Researc

Unsupervised entity linking using graph-based semantic similarity

Nowadays, the human textual data constitutes a great proportion of the shared information resources such as World Wide Web (WWW). Social networks, news and learning resources as well as Knowledge Bases (KBs) are just the small examples that widely contain the textual data which is used by both human and machine readers. The nature of human languages is highly ambiguous, means that a short portion of a textual context (such as words or phrases) can semantically be interpreted in different ways. A language processor should detect the best interpretation depending on the context in which each word or phrase appears. In case of human readers, the brain is quite proficient in interfering textual data. Human language developed in a way that reflects the innate ability provided by the brain’s neural networks. However, there still exist the moments that the text disambiguation task would remain a hard challenge for the human readers. In case of machine readers, it has been a long-term challenge to develop the ability to do natural language processing and machine learning. Different interpretation can change the broad range of topics and targets. The different in interpretation can cause serious impacts when it is used in critical domains that need high precision. Thus, the correctly inferring the ambiguous words would be highly crucial. To tackle it, two tasks have been developed: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to infer the sense (i.e. meaning) of ambiguous words, when the word has multiple meanings, and Entity Linking (EL) (also called, Named Entity Disambiguation–NED, Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation–NERD, or Named Entity Normalization–NEN) which is used to explore the correct reference of Named Entity (NE) mentions occurring in documents. The solution to these problems impacts other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, and inference. This document summarizes the works towards developing an unsupervised Entity Linking (EL) system using graph-based semantic similarity aiming to disambiguate Named Entity (NE) mentions occurring in a target document. The EL task is highly challenging since each entity can usually be referred to by several NE mentions (synonymy). In addition, a NE mention may be used to indicate distinct entities (polysemy). Thus, much effort is necessary to tackle these challenges. Our EL system disambiguates the NE mentions in several steps. For each step, we have proposed, implemented, and evaluated several approaches. We evaluated our EL system in TAC-KBP4 English EL evaluation framework in which the system input consists of a set of queries, each containing a query name (target NE mention) along with start and end offsets of that mention in the target document. The output is either a NE entry id in a reference Knowledge Base (KB) or a Not-in-KB (NIL) id in the case that system could not find any appropriate entry for that query. At the end, we have analyzed our result in different aspects. To disambiguate query name we apply a graph-based semantic similarity approach to extract the network of the semantic knowledge existing in the content of target document.Este documento es un resumen del trabajo realizado para la construccion de un sistema de Entity Linking (EL) destinado a desambiguar menciones de Entidades Nombradas (Named Entities, NE) que aparecen en un documento de referencia. La tarea de EL presenta una gran dificultad ya que cada entidad puede ser mencionada de varias maneras (sinonimia). Ademas cada mencion puede referirse a mas de una entidad (polisemia). Asi pues, se debe realizar un gran esfuerzo para hacer frente a estos retos. Nuestro sistema de EL lleva a cabo la desambiguacion de las menciones de NE en varias etapas. Para cada etapa hemos propuesto, implementado y evaluado varias aproximaciones. Hemos evaluado nuestro sistema de EL en el marco del TAC-KBP English EL evaluation framework. En este marco la evaluacion se realiza a partir de una entrada que consiste en un conjunto de consultas cada una de las cuales consta de un nombre (query name) que corresponde a una mencion objetivo cuya posicion en un documento de referencia se indica. La salida debe indicar a que entidad en una base de conocimiento (Knowledge Base, KB) corresponde la mencion. En caso de no existir un referente apropiado la respuesta sera Not-in-KB (NIL). La tesis concluye con un analisis pormenorizado de los resultados obtenidos en la evaluacion.Postprint (published version

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015)

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015) held in conjunction with the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2015) at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, on July 31st 2015. Narratives are at the heart of information sharing. Ever since people began to share their experiences, they have connected them to form narratives. The study od storytelling and the field of literary theory called narratology have developed complex frameworks and models related to various aspects of narrative such as plots structures, narrative embeddings, characters’ perspectives, reader response, point of view, narrative voice, narrative goals, and many others. These notions from narratology have been applied mainly in Artificial Intelligence and to model formal semantic approaches to narratives (e.g. Plot Units developed by Lehnert (1981)). In recent years, computational narratology has qualified as an autonomous field of study and research. Narrative has been the focus of a number of workshops and conferences (AAAI Symposia, Interactive Storytelling Conference (ICIDS), Computational Models of Narrative). Furthermore, reference annotation schemes for narratives have been proposed (NarrativeML by Mani (2013)). The workshop aimed at bringing together researchers from different communities working on representing and extracting narrative structures in news, a text genre which is highly used in NLP but which has received little attention with respect to narrative structure, representation and analysis. Currently, advances in NLP technology have made it feasible to look beyond scenario-driven, atomic extraction of events from single documents and work towards extracting story structures from multiple documents, while these documents are published over time as news streams. Policy makers, NGOs, information specialists (such as journalists and librarians) and others are increasingly in need of tools that support them in finding salient stories in large amounts of information to more effectively implement policies, monitor actions of “big players” in the society and check facts. Their tasks often revolve around reconstructing cases either with respect to specific entities (e.g. person or organizations) or events (e.g. hurricane Katrina). Storylines represent explanatory schemas that enable us to make better selections of relevant information but also projections to the future. They form a valuable potential for exploiting news data in an innovative way.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen