Supporting text mining for e-Science: the challenges for Grid-enabled natural language processing

Over the last few years, language technology has moved rapidly from 'applied research' to 'engineering', and from small-scale to large-scale engineering. Applications such as advanced text mining systems are feasible, but very resource-intensive, while research seeking to address the underlying language processing questions faces very real practical and methodological limitations. The e-Science vision, and the creation of the e-Science Grid, promises the level of integrated large-scale technological support required to sustain this important and successful new technology area. In this paper, we discuss the foundations for the deployment of text mining and other language technology on the Grid - the protocols and tools required to build distributed large-scale language technology systems, meeting the needs of users, application builders and researchers

Methods of Russian Patent Analysis

The article presents a method for extracting predicate-argument constructions characterizing the composition of the structural elements of the inventions and the relationships between them. The extracted structures are converted into a domain ontology and used in prior art patent search and information support of automated invention. The analysis of existing natural language processing (NLP) tools in relation to the processing of Russian-language patents has been carried out. A new method for extracting structured data from patents has been proposed taking into account the specificity of the text of patents and is based on the shallow parsing and segmentation of sentences. The value of the F1 metric for a rigorous estimate of data extraction is 63% and for a lax estimate is 79%. The results obtained suggest that the proposed method is promising

Web 2.0, language resources and standards to automatically build a multilingual named entity lexicon

This paper proposes to advance in the current state-of-the-art of automatic Language Resource (LR) building by taking into consideration three elements: (i) the knowledge available in existing LRs, (ii) the vast amount of information available from the collaborative paradigm that has emerged from the Web 2.0 and (iii) the use of standards to improve interoperability. We present a case study in which a set of LRs for different languages (WordNet for English and Spanish and Parole-Simple-Clips for Italian) are extended with Named Entities (NE) by exploiting Wikipedia and the aforementioned LRs. The practical result is a multilingual NE lexicon connected to these LRs and to two ontologies: SUMO and SIMPLE. Furthermore, the paper addresses an important problem which affects the Computational Linguistics area in the present, interoperability, by making use of the ISO LMF standard to encode this lexicon. The different steps of the procedure (mapping, disambiguation, extraction, NE identification and postprocessing) are comprehensively explained and evaluated. The resulting resource contains 974,567, 137,583 and 125,806 NEs for English, Spanish and Italian respectively. Finally, in order to check the usefulness of the constructed resource, we apply it into a state-of-the-art Question Answering system and evaluate its impact; the NE lexicon improves the system’s accuracy by 28.1%. Compared to previous approaches to build NE repositories, the current proposal represents a step forward in terms of automation, language independence, amount of NEs acquired and richness of the information represented

Natural language processing in CLIME, a multilingual legal advisory system

This paper describes CLIME, a web-based legal advisory system with a multilingual natural language interface. clime is a 'proof-of-concept' system which answers queries relating to ship-building and ship-operating regulations. Its core knowledge source is a set of such regulations encoded as a conceptual domain model and a set of formalised legal inference rules. The system supports retrieval of regulations via the conceptual model, and assessment of the legality of a situation or activity on a ship according to the legal inference rules. The focus of this paper is on the natural language aspects of the system, which help the user to construct semantically complex queries using wysiwym technology, allow the system to produce extended and cohesive responses and explanations, and support the whole interaction through a hybrid synchronous/asynchronous dialogue structure. Multilinguality (English and French) is viewed simply as interface localisation: the core representations are languageneutral, and the system can present extended or local interactions in either language at any time. The development of clime featured a high degree of client involvement, and the specification, implementation and evaluation of natural language components in this context are also discussed

NLPContributions: An Annotation Scheme for Machine Reading of Scholarly Contributions in Natural Language Processing Literature

We describe an annotation initiative to capture the scholarly contributions in natural language processing (NLP) articles, particularly, for the articles that discuss machine learning (ML) approaches for various information extraction tasks. We develop the annotation task based on a pilot annotation exercise on 50 NLP-ML scholarly articles presenting contributions to five information extraction tasks 1. machine translation, 2. named entity recognition, 3. question answering, 4. relation classification, and 5. text classification. In this article, we describe the outcomes of this pilot annotation phase. Through the exercise we have obtained an annotation methodology; and found ten core information units that reflect the contribution of the NLP-ML scholarly investigations. The resulting annotation scheme we developed based on these information units is called NLPContributions. The overarching goal of our endeavor is four-fold: 1) to find a systematic set of patterns of subject-predicate-object statements for the semantic structuring of scholarly contributions that are more or less generically applicable for NLP-ML research articles; 2) to apply the discovered patterns in the creation of a larger annotated dataset for training machine readers of research contributions; 3) to ingest the dataset into the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) infrastructure as a showcase for creating user-friendly state-of-the-art overviews; 4) to integrate the machine readers into the ORKG to assist users in the manual curation of their respective article contributions. We envision that the NLPContributions methodology engenders a wider discussion on the topic toward its further refinement and development. Our pilot annotated dataset of 50 NLP-ML scholarly articles according to the NLPContributions scheme is openly available to the research community at https://doi.org/10.25835/0019761.Comment: In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Extraction and Evaluation of Knowledge Entities from Scientific Documents (EEKE 2020) co-located with the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2020 (JCDL 2020), Virtual Event, China, August 1. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2658

Site-Specific Rules Extraction in Precision Agriculture

El incremento sostenible en la producción alimentaria para satisfacer las necesidades de una población mundial en aumento es un verdadero reto cuando tenemos en cuenta el impacto constante de plagas y enfermedades en los cultivos. Debido a las importantes pérdidas económicas que se producen, el uso de tratamientos químicos es demasiado alto; causando contaminación del medio ambiente y resistencia a distintos tratamientos. En este contexto, la comunidad agrícola divisa la aplicación de tratamientos más específicos para cada lugar, así como la validación automática con la conformidad legal. Sin embargo, la especificación de estos tratamientos se encuentra en regulaciones expresadas en lenguaje natural. Por este motivo, traducir regulaciones a una representación procesable por máquinas está tomando cada vez más importancia en la agricultura de precisión.Actualmente, los requisitos para traducir las regulaciones en reglas formales están lejos de ser cumplidos; y con el rápido desarrollo de la ciencia agrícola, la verificación manual de la conformidad legal se torna inabordable.En esta tesis, el objetivo es construir y evaluar un sistema de extracción de reglas para destilar de manera efectiva la información relevante de las regulaciones y transformar las reglas de lenguaje natural a un formato estructurado que pueda ser procesado por máquinas. Para ello, hemos separado la extracción de reglas en dos pasos. El primero es construir una ontología del dominio; un modelo para describir los desórdenes que producen las enfermedades en los cultivos y sus tratamientos. El segundo paso es extraer información para poblar la ontología. Puesto que usamos técnicas de aprendizaje automático, implementamos la metodología MATTER para realizar el proceso de anotación de regulaciones. Una vez creado el corpus, construimos un clasificador de categorías de reglas que discierne entre obligaciones y prohibiciones; y un sistema para la extracción de restricciones en reglas, que reconoce información relevante para retener el isomorfismo con la regulación original. Para estos componentes, empleamos, entre otra técnicas de aprendizaje profundo, redes neuronales convolucionales y “Long Short- Term Memory”. Además, utilizamos como baselines algoritmos más tradicionales como “support-vector machines” y “random forests”.Como resultado, presentamos la ontología PCT-O, que ha sido alineada con otras ontologías como NCBI, PubChem, ChEBI y Wikipedia. El modelo puede ser utilizado para la identificación de desórdenes, el análisis de conflictos entre tratamientos y la comparación entre legislaciones de distintos países. Con respecto a los sistemas de extracción, evaluamos empíricamente el comportamiento con distintas métricas, pero la métrica F1 es utilizada para seleccionar los mejores sistemas. En el caso del clasificador de categorías de reglas, el mejor sistema obtiene un macro F1 de 92,77% y un F1 binario de 85,71%. Este sistema usa una red “bidirectional long short-term memory” con “word embeddings” como entrada. En relación al extractor de restricciones de reglas, el mejor sistema obtiene un micro F1 de 88,3%. Este extractor utiliza como entrada una combinación de “character embeddings” junto a “word embeddings” y una red neuronal “bidirectional long short-term memory”.<br /

Classifying Relations using Recurrent Neural Network with Ontological-Concept Embedding

Relation extraction and classification represents a fundamental and challenging aspect of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research which depends on other tasks such as entity detection and word sense disambiguation. Traditional relation extraction methods based on pattern-matching using regular expressions grammars and lexico-syntactic pattern rules suffer from several drawbacks including the labor involved in handcrafting and maintaining large number of rules that are difficult to reuse. Current research has focused on using Neural Networks to help improve the accuracy of relation extraction tasks using a specific type of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). A promising approach for relation classification uses an RNN that incorporates an ontology-based concept embedding layer in addition to word embeddings. This dissertation presents several improvements to this approach by addressing its main limitations. First, several different types of semantic relationships between concepts are incorporated into the model; prior work has only considered is-a hierarchical relationships. Secondly, a significantly larger vocabulary of concepts is used. Thirdly, an improved method for concept matching was devised. The results of adding these improvements to two state-of-the-art baseline models demonstrated an improvement to accuracy when evaluated on benchmark data used in prior studies

Is question answering fit for the Semantic Web? A survey

With the recent rapid growth of the Semantic Web (SW), the processes of searching and querying content that is both massive in scale and heterogeneous have become increasingly challenging. User-friendly interfaces, which can support end users in querying and exploring this novel and diverse, structured information space, are needed to make the vision of the SW a reality. We present a survey on ontology-based Question Answering (QA), which has emerged in recent years to exploit the opportunities offered by structured semantic information on the Web. First, we provide a comprehensive perspective by analyzing the general background and history of the QA research field, from influential works from the artificial intelligence and database communities developed in the 70s and later decades, through open domain QA stimulated by the QA track in TREC since 1999, to the latest commercial semantic QA solutions, before tacking the current state of the art in open userfriendly interfaces for the SW. Second, we examine the potential of this technology to go beyond the current state of the art to support end-users in reusing and querying the SW content. We conclude our review with an outlook for this novel research area, focusing in particular on the R&D directions that need to be pursued to realize the goal of efficient and competent retrieval and integration of answers from large scale, heterogeneous, and continuously evolving semantic sources

Applications of Natural Language Processing in Biodiversity Science

Centuries of biological knowledge are contained in the massive body of scientific literature, written for human-readability but too big for any one person to consume. Large-scale mining of information from the literature is necessary if biology is to transform into a data-driven science. A computer can handle the volume but cannot make sense of the language. This paper reviews and discusses the use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine-learning algorithms to extract information from systematic literature. NLP algorithms have been used for decades, but require special development for application in the biological realm due to the special nature of the language. Many tools exist for biological information extraction (cellular processes, taxonomic names, and morphological characters), but none have been applied life wide and most still require testing and development. Progress has been made in developing algorithms for automated annotation of taxonomic text, identification of taxonomic names in text, and extraction of morphological character information from taxonomic descriptions. This manuscript will briefly discuss the key steps in applying information extraction tools to enhance biodiversity science