Acquiring Word-Meaning Mappings for Natural Language Interfaces

This paper focuses on a system, WOLFIE (WOrd Learning From Interpreted Examples), that acquires a semantic lexicon from a corpus of sentences paired with semantic representations. The lexicon learned consists of phrases paired with meaning representations. WOLFIE is part of an integrated system that learns to transform sentences into representations such as logical database queries. Experimental results are presented demonstrating WOLFIE's ability to learn useful lexicons for a database interface in four different natural languages. The usefulness of the lexicons learned by WOLFIE are compared to those acquired by a similar system, with results favorable to WOLFIE. A second set of experiments demonstrates WOLFIE's ability to scale to larger and more difficult, albeit artificially generated, corpora. In natural language acquisition, it is difficult to gather the annotated data needed for supervised learning; however, unannotated data is fairly plentiful. Active learning methods attempt to select for annotation and training only the most informative examples, and therefore are potentially very useful in natural language applications. However, most results to date for active learning have only considered standard classification tasks. To reduce annotation effort while maintaining accuracy, we apply active learning to semantic lexicons. We show that active learning can significantly reduce the number of annotated examples required to achieve a given level of performance

A Framework for Top-K Queries over Weighted RDF Graphs

abstract: The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a specification that aims to support the conceptual modeling of metadata or information about resources in the form of a directed graph composed of triples of knowledge (facts). RDF also provides mechanisms to encode meta-information (such as source, trust, and certainty) about facts already existing in a knowledge base through a process called reification. In this thesis, an extension to the current RDF specification is proposed in order to enhance RDF triples with an application specific weight (cost). Unlike reification, this extension treats these additional weights as first class knowledge attributes in the RDF model, which can be leveraged by the underlying query engine. Additionally, current RDF query languages, such as SPARQL, have a limited expressive power which limits the capabilities of applications that use them. Plus, even in the presence of language extensions, current RDF stores could not provide methods and tools to process extended queries in an efficient and effective way. To overcome these limitations, a set of novel primitives for the SPARQL language is proposed to express Top-k queries using traditional query patterns as well as novel predicates inspired by those from the XPath language. Plus, an extended query processor engine is developed to support efficient ranked path search, join, and indexing. In addition, several query optimization strategies are proposed, which employ heuristics, advanced indexing tools, and two graph metrics: proximity and sub-result inter-arrival time. These strategies aim to find join orders that reduce the total query execution time while avoiding worst-case pattern combinations. Finally, extensive experimental evaluation shows that using these two metrics in query optimization has a significant impact on the performance and efficiency of Top-k queries. Further experiments also show that proximity and inter-arrival have an even greater, although sometimes undesirable, impact when combined through aggregation functions. Based on these results, a hybrid algorithm is proposed which acknowledges that proximity is more important than inter-arrival time, due to its more complete nature, and performs a fine-grained combination of both metrics by analyzing the differences between their individual scores and performing the aggregation only if these differences are negligible.Dissertation/ThesisM.S. Computer Science 201

Connectionist Inference Models

The performance of symbolic inference tasks has long been a challenge to connectionists. In this paper, we present an extended survey of this area. Existing connectionist inference systems are reviewed, with particular reference to how they perform variable binding and rule-based reasoning, and whether they involve distributed or localist representations. The benefits and disadvantages of different representations and systems are outlined, and conclusions drawn regarding the capabilities of connectionist inference systems when compared with symbolic inference systems or when used for cognitive modeling

LOGIC AND CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING FOR COMPUTATIONAL SUSTAINABILITY

Computational Sustainability is an interdisciplinary field that aims to develop computational and mathematical models and methods for decision making concerning the management and allocation of resources in order to help solve environmental problems. This thesis deals with a broad spectrum of such problems (energy efficiency, water management, limiting greenhouse gas emissions and fuel consumption) giving a contribution towards their solution by means of Logic Programming (LP) and Constraint Programming (CP), declarative paradigms from Artificial Intelligence of proven solidity. The problems described in this thesis were proposed by experts of the respective domains and tested on the real data instances they provided. The results are encouraging and show the aptness of the chosen methodologies and approaches. The overall aim of this work is twofold: both to address real world problems in order to achieve practical results and to get, from the application of LP and CP technologies to complex scenarios, feedback and directions useful for their improvement