Temporally Biased Search Result Snippets

The search engine result snippets are an important source of information for the user to obtain quick insights into the corresponding result documents. When the search terms are too general, like a person\u27s name or a company\u27s name, creating an appropriate snippet that effectively summarizes the document\u27s content can be challenging owing to multiple occurrences of the search term in the top ranked documents, without a simple means to select a subset of sentences containing them to form result snippet. In web pages classified as narratives and news articles, multiple references to explicit, implicit and relative temporal expressions can be found. Based on these expressions, the sentences can be ordered on a timeline. In this thesis, we propose the idea of generation of an alternate search results snippet, by exploiting these temporal expressions embedded within the pages, using a timeline map. Our method of snippets generation is mainly targeted at general search terms. At present, when the search terms are too general, the existing systems generate static snippets for resultant pages like displaying the first line. In our approach, we introduce an alternate method of extracting and selecting temporal data from these pages to adapt a snippet to be a more effective summary. Specifically, it selects and blends temporally interesting sentences. Using weighted kappa measure, we evaluate our approach by comparing snippets generated for multiple search terms based on existing systems and snippets generated by using our approach

Extracting Temporal Expressions from Unstructured Open Resources

AETAS is an end-to-end system with SOA approach that retrieves plain text data from web and blog news and represents and stores them in RDF, with a special focus on their temporal dimension. The system allows users to acquire, browse and query Linked Data obtained from unstructured sources

Event Detection in Wikipedia Edit History Improved by Documents Web Based Automatic Assessment

A majority of current work in events extraction assumes the static nature of relationships in constant expertise knowledge bases. However, in collaborative environments, such as Wikipedia, information and systems are extraordinarily dynamic over time. In this work, we introduce a new approach for extracting complex structures of events from Wikipedia. We advocate a new model to represent events by engaging more than one entities that are generalizable to an arbitrary language. The evolution of an event is captured successfully primarily based on analyzing the user edits records in Wikipedia. Our work presents a basis for a singular class of evolution-aware entity-primarily based enrichment algorithms and will extensively increase the quality of entity accessibility and temporal retrieval for Wikipedia. We formalize this problem case and conduct comprehensive experiments on a real dataset of 1.8 million Wikipedia articles in order to show the effectiveness of our proposed answer. Furthermore, we suggest a new event validation automatic method relying on a supervised model to predict the presence of events in a non-annotated corpus. As the extra document source for event validation, we chose the Web due to its ease of accessibility and wide event coverage. Our outcomes display that we are capable of acquiring 70% precision evaluated on a manually annotated corpus. Ultimately, we conduct a comparison of our strategy versus the Current Event Portal of Wikipedia and discover that our proposed WikipEvent along with the usage of Co-References technique may be utilized to provide new and more data on events

Methodological guidelines for reusing general ontologies

Currently, there is a great deal of well-founded explicit knowledge formalizing general notions, such as time concepts and the part_of relation. Yet, it is often the case that instead of reusing ontologies that implement such notions (the so-called general ontologies), engineers create procedural programs that implicitly implement this knowledge. They do not save time and code by reusing explicit knowledge, and devote effort to solve problems that other people have already adequately solved. Consequently, we have developed a methodology that helps engineers to: (a) identify the type of general ontology to be reused; (b) find out which axioms and definitions should be reused; (c) make a decision, using formal concept analysis, on what general ontology is going to be reused; and (d) adapt and integrate the selected general ontology in the domain ontology to be developed. To illustrate our approach we have employed use-cases. For each use case, we provide a set of heuristics with examples. Each of these heuristics has been tested in either OWL or Prolog. Our methodology has been applied to develop a pharmaceutical product ontology. Additionally, we have carried out a controlled experiment with graduated students doing a MCs in Artificial Intelligence. This experiment has yielded some interesting findings concerning what kind of features the future extensions of the methodology should have

Joint models for information and knowledge extraction

Information and knowledge extraction from natural language text is a key asset for question answering, semantic search, automatic summarization, and other machine reading applications. There are many sub-tasks involved such as named entity recognition, named entity disambiguation, co-reference resolution, relation extraction, event detection, discourse parsing, and others. Solving these tasks is challenging as natural language text is unstructured, noisy, and ambiguous. Key challenges, which focus on identifying and linking named entities, as well as discovering relations between them, include: • High NERD Quality. Named entity recognition and disambiguation, NERD for short, are preformed first in the extraction pipeline. Their results may affect other downstream tasks. • Coverage vs. Quality of Relation Extraction. Model-based information extraction methods achieve high extraction quality at low coverage, whereas open information extraction methods capture relational phrases between entities. However, the latter degrades in quality by non-canonicalized and noisy output. These limitations need to be overcome. • On-the-fly Knowledge Acquisition. Real-world applications such as question answering, monitoring content streams, etc. demand on-the-fly knowledge acquisition. Building such an end-to-end system is challenging because it requires high throughput, high extraction quality, and high coverage. This dissertation addresses the above challenges, developing new methods to advance the state of the art. The first contribution is a robust model for joint inference between entity recognition and disambiguation. The second contribution is a novel model for relation extraction and entity disambiguation on Wikipediastyle text. The third contribution is an end-to-end system for constructing querydriven, on-the-fly knowledge bases.Informations- und Wissensextraktion aus natürlichsprachlichen Texten sind Schlüsselthemen vieler wissensbassierter Anwendungen. Darunter fallen zum Beispiel Frage-Antwort-Systeme, semantische Suchmaschinen, oder Applikationen zur automatischen Zusammenfassung und zum maschinellem Lesen von Texten. Zur Lösung dieser Aufgaben müssen u.a. Teilaufgaben, wie die Erkennung und Disambiguierung benannter Entitäten, Koreferenzresolution, Relationsextraktion, Ereigniserkennung, oder Diskursparsen, durchgeführt werden. Solche Aufgaben stellen eine Herausforderung dar, da Texte natürlicher Sprache in der Regel unstrukturiert, verrauscht und mehrdeutig sind. Folgende zentrale Herausforderungen adressieren sowohl die Identifizierung und das Verknüpfen benannter Entitäten als auch das Erkennen von Beziehungen zwischen diesen Entitäten: • Hohe NERD Qualität. Die Erkennung und Disambiguierung benannter Entitäten (engl. "Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation", kurz "NERD") wird in Extraktionspipelines in der Regel zuerst ausgeführt. Die Ergebnisse beeinflussen andere nachgelagerte Aufgaben. • Abdeckung und Qualität der Relationsextraktion. Modellbasierte Informationsextraktionsmethoden erzielen eine hohe Extraktionsqualität, bei allerdings niedriger Abdeckung. Offene Informationsextraktionsmethoden erfassen relationale Phrasen zwischen Entitäten. Allerdings leiden diese Methoden an niedriger Qualität durch mehrdeutige Entitäten und verrauschte Ausgaben. Diese Einschränkungen müssen überwunden werden. • On-the-Fly Wissensakquisition. Reale Anwendungen wie Frage-Antwort- Systeme, die Überwachung von Inhaltsströmen usw. erfordern On-the-Fly Wissensakquise. Die Entwicklung solcher ganzheitlichen Systeme stellt eine hohe Herausforderung dar, da ein hoher Durchsatz, eine hohe Extraktionsqualität sowie eine hohe Abdeckung erforderlich sind. Diese Arbeit adressiert diese Probleme und stellt neue Methoden vor, um den aktuellen Stand der Forschung zu erweitern. Diese sind: • Ein robustesModell zur integrierten Inferenz zur gemeinschaftlichen Erkennung und Disambiguierung von Entitäten. • Ein neues Modell zur Relationsextraktion und Disambiguierung von Wikipedia-ähnlichen Texten. • Ein ganzheitliches System zur Erstellung Anfrage-getriebener On-the-Fly Wissensbanken

RISO-GCT – Determinação do contexto temporal de conceitos em textos.

Devido ao crescimento constante da quantidade de textos disponíveis na Web, existe uma necessidade de catalogar estas informações que surgem a cada instante. No entanto, trata-se de uma tarefa árdua e na qual seres humanos são incapazes de realizar esta tarefa de maneira manual, tendo em vista a quantidade incontável de dados que são disponibilizados a cada segundo. Inúmeras pesquisas têm sido realizadas no intuito de automatizar este processo de catalogação. Uma vertente de grande utilidade para as várias áreas do conhecimento humano é a indexação de documentos com base nos contextos temporais presentes nestes documentos. Esta não é uma tarefa trivial, pois envolve a análise de informações não estruturadas presentes em linguagem natural, disponíveis nos mais diversos idiomas, dentre outras dificuldades. O objetivo principal deste trabalho é criar uma abordagem capaz de permitir a indexação de documentos, determinando mapas de tópicos enriquecidos com conceitos e as respectivas informações temporais relacionadas. Tal abordagem deu origem ao RISO-GCT (Geração de Contextos Temporais), componente do Projeto RISO (Recuperação da Informação Semântica de Objetos Textuais), que tem como objetivo criar um ambiente de indexação e recuperação semântica de documentos possibilitando uma recuperação mais acurada. O RISO-GCT utilizou os resultados de um módulo preliminar, o RISO-TT (Temporal Tagger), responsável por etiquetar informações temporais presentes em documentos e realizar o processo de normalização das expressões temporais encontradas. Deste processo foi aperfeiçoada a abordagem responsável pela normalização de expressões temporais, para que estas possam ser manipuladas mais facilmente na determinação dos contextos temporais. . Foram realizados experimentos para avaliar a eficácia da abordagem proposta nesta pesquisa. O primeiro, com o intuito de verificar se o Topic Map previamente criado pelo RISO-IC (Indexação Conceitual), foi enriquecido com as informações temporais relacionadas aos conceitos de maneira correta e o segundo, para analisar a eficácia da abordagem de normalização das expressões temporais extraídas de documentos. Os experimentos concluíram que tanto o RISO-GCT, quanto o RISO-TT incrementado obtiveram resultados superiores aos concorrentes.Due to the constant growth of the number of texts available on the Web, there is a need to catalog that information which appear at every moment. However, it is an arduous task in which humans are unable to perform this task manually, given the increased amount of data available at every second. Numerous studies have been conducted in order to automate the cataloging process. A research line with utility for various areas of human knowledge is the indexing of documents based on temporal contexts present in these documents. This is not a trivial task, as it involves the analysis of unstructured information present in natural language, available in several languages, among other difficulties. The main objective of this work is to create a model to allow indexing of documents, creating topic maps enriched with the concepts in text and their related temporal information. This approach led to the RISO-GCT (Temporal Contexts Generation), a part of RISO Project (Semantic Information Retrieval on Text Objects), which aims to create a semantic indexing environment and retrieval of documents, enabling a more accurate recovery. RISO-GCT uses the results of a preliminary module, the RISO-TT (Temporal Tagger) responsible the labeling temporal information contained in documents and carrying out the process of normalization of temporal expressions. Found. In this module the normalization of temporal expressions has been improved, in order allow a richer temporal context determination. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach proposed a in this research. The first, in order to verify that the topic map previously created by RISO-IC has been correctly enriched with temporal information related to the concepts correctly, and the second, to analyze the effectiveness of the normalization of expressions extracted from documents. The experiments concluded that both the RISO-GCT, as the RISO-TT, which was evolved during this work, obtained better results than similar tools

Grounding event references in news

Events are frequently discussed in natural language, and their accurate identification is central to language understanding. Yet they are diverse and complex in ontology and reference; computational processing hence proves challenging. News provides a shared basis for communication by reporting events. We perform several studies into news event reference. One annotation study characterises each news report in terms of its update and topic events, but finds that topic is better consider through explicit references to background events. In this context, we propose the event linking task which—analogous to named entity linking or disambiguation—models the grounding of references to notable events. It defines the disambiguation of an event reference as a link to the archival article that first reports it. When two references are linked to the same article, they need not be references to the same event. Event linking hopes to provide an intuitive approximation to coreference, erring on the side of over-generation in contrast with the literature. The task is also distinguished in considering event references from multiple perspectives over time. We diagnostically evaluate the task by first linking references to past, newsworthy events in news and opinion pieces to an archive of the Sydney Morning Herald. The intensive annotation results in only a small corpus of 229 distinct links. However, we observe that a number of hyperlinks targeting online news correspond to event links. We thus acquire two large corpora of hyperlinks at very low cost. From these we learn weights for temporal and term overlap features in a retrieval system. These noisy data lead to significant performance gains over a bag-of-words baseline. While our initial system can accurately predict many event links, most will require deep linguistic processing for their disambiguation

Populating knowledge bases with temporal information

Recent progress in information extraction has enabled the automatic construction of large knowledge bases. Knowledge bases contain millions of entities (e.g. persons, organizations, events, etc.), their semantic classes, and facts about them. Knowledge bases have become a great asset for semantic search, entity linking, deep analytics, and question answering. However, a common limitation of current knowledge bases is the poor coverage of temporal knowledge. First of all, so far, knowledge bases have focused on popular events and ignored long tail events such as political scandals, local festivals, or protests. Secondly, they do not cover the textual phrases denoting events and temporal facts at all. The goal of this dissertation, thus, is to automatically populate knowledge bases with this kind of temporal knowledge. The dissertation makes the following contributions to address the afore mentioned limitations. The first contribution is a method for extracting events from news articles. The method reconciles the extracted events into canonicalized representations and organizes them into fine-grained semantic classes. The second contribution is a method for mining the textual phrases denoting the events and facts. The method infers the temporal scopes of these phrases and maps them to a knowledge base. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that our methods yield high quality output compared to state-of- the-art approaches, and can indeed populate knowledge bases with temporal knowledge.Der Fortschritt in der Informationsextraktion ermöglicht heute das automatischen Erstellen von Wissensbasen. Derartige Wissensbasen enthalten Entitäten wie Personen, Organisationen oder Events sowie Informationen über diese und deren semantische Klasse. Automatisch generierte Wissensbasen bilden eine wesentliche Grundlage für das semantische Suchen, das Verknüpfen von Entitäten, die Textanalyse und für natürlichsprachliche Frage-Antwortsysteme. Eine Schwäche aktueller Wissensbasen ist jedoch die unzureichende Erfassung von temporalen Informationen. Wissenbasen fokussieren in erster Linie auf populäre Events und ignorieren weniger bekannnte Events wie z.B. politische Skandale, lokale Veranstaltungen oder Demonstrationen. Zudem werden Textphrasen zur Bezeichung von Events und temporalen Fakten nicht erfasst. Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, Methoden zu entwickeln, die temporales Wissen au- tomatisch in Wissensbasen integrieren. Dazu leistet die Dissertation folgende Beiträge: 1. Die Entwicklung einer Methode zur Extrahierung von Events aus Nachrichtenartikeln sowie deren Darstellung in einer kanonischen Form und ihrer Einordnung in detaillierte semantische Klassen. 2. Die Entwicklung einer Methode zur Gewinnung von Textphrasen, die Events und Fakten in Wissensbasen bezeichnen sowie einer Methode zur Ableitung ihres zeitlichen Verlaufs und ihrer Dauer. Unsere Experimente belegen, dass die von uns entwickelten Methoden zu qualitativ deutlich besseren Ausgabewerten führen als bisherige Verfahren und Wissensbasen tatsächlich um temporales Wissen erweitern können

User-centric knowledge extraction and maintenance

An ontology is a machine readable knowledge collection. There is an abundance of information available for human consumption. Thus, large general knowledge ontologies are typically generated tapping into this information source using imperfect automatic extraction approaches that translate human readable text into machine readable semantic knowledge. This thesis provides methods for user-driven ontology generation and maintenance. In particular, this work consists of three main contributions: 1. An interactive human-supported extraction tool: LUKe. The system extends an automatic extraction framework to integrate human feedback on extraction decisions and extracted information on multiple levels. 2. A document retrieval approach based on semantic statements: S3K. While one application is the retrieval of documents that support extracted information to verify the correctness of the piece of information, another application in combination with an extraction system is a fact based indexing of a document corpus allowing statement based document retrieval. 3. A method for similarity based ontology navigation: QBEES. The approach enables search by example. That is, given a set of semantic entities, it provides the most similar entities with respect to their semantic properties considering different aspects. All three components are integrated into a modular architecture that also provides an interface for third-party components.Eine Ontologie ist eine Wissenssammlung in maschinenlesbarer Form. Da eine große Bandbreite an Informationen nur in natürlichsprachlicher Form verfügbar ist, werden maschinenlesbare Ontologien häufig durch imperfekte automatische Verfahren erzeugt, die eine Übersetzung in eine maschinenlesbare Darstellung vornehmen. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden Methoden zur menschlichen Unterstützung des Extraktionsprozesses und Wartung der erzeugten Wissensbasen präsentiert. Dabei werden drei Beiträge geleistet: 1. Zum ersten wird ein interaktives Extraktionstool (LUKe) vorgestellt. Hierfür wird ein bestehendes Extraktionssystem um die Integration von Nutzerkorrekturen auf verschiedenen Ebenen der Extraktion erweitert und an ein beispielhaftes Szenario angepasst. 2. Zum zweiten wird ein Ansatz (S3K) zur Dokumentsuche basierend auf faktischen Aussagen beschrieben. Dieser erlaubt eine aussagenbasierte Suche nach Belegstellen oder weiteren Informationen im Zusammenhang mit diesen Aussagen in den Dokumentsammlungen die der Wissensbasis zugrunde liegen. 3. Zuletzt wird QBEES, eine Ähnlichkeitssuche in Ontologien, vorgestellt. QBEES ermöglicht die Suche bzw. Empfehlung von ähnlichen Entitäten auf Basis der semantischen Eigenschaften die sie mit einer als Beispiel angegebenen Menge von Entitäten gemein haben. Alle einzelnen Komponenten sind zudem in eine modulare Gesamtarchitektur integriert