13,033 research outputs found
A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web
Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with
innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a
robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information
overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based
information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue
and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the
Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the
Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open
knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open
knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention
is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well
as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic
Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in
information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then
reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future
prospects
A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter
Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are
central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic
identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been
explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network
platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of
tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and
real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained
significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing
with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and
context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall
picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the
prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We
first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing
Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then
structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency
is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies
adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two
related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest
recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur
Revamping question answering with a semantic approach over world knowledge
Classic textual question answering (QA) approaches that
rely on statistical keyword relevance scoring without exploiting semantic content are useful to a certain extent, but are limited to questions answered by a small text excerpt. With the maturation of Wikipedia and with upcoming projects like DBpedia, we feel that nowadays QA can adopt a deeper, semantic approach to the task, where answers can be inferred using knowledge bases to overcome the limitations of textual QA approaches. In GikiCLEF, a QA-flavoured evaluation task, the best performing systems followed a semantic approach. In this paper, we present our motivations for preferring semantic approaches to QA over textual approaches, with Wikipedia serving as a raw knowledge source
Mapping bilateral information interests using the activity of Wikipedia editors
We live in a global village where electronic communication has eliminated the
geographical barriers of information exchange. The road is now open to
worldwide convergence of information interests, shared values, and
understanding. Nevertheless, interests still vary between countries around the
world. This raises important questions about what today's world map of in-
formation interests actually looks like and what factors cause the barriers of
information exchange between countries. To quantitatively construct a world map
of information interests, we devise a scalable statistical model that
identifies countries with similar information interests and measures the
countries' bilateral similarities. From the similarities we connect countries
in a global network and find that countries can be mapped into 18 clusters with
similar information interests. Through regression we find that language and
religion best explain the strength of the bilateral ties and formation of
clusters. Our findings provide a quantitative basis for further studies to
better understand the complex interplay between shared interests and conflict
on a global scale. The methodology can also be extended to track changes over
time and capture important trends in global information exchange.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures in Palgrave Communications 1 (2015
Document Filtering for Long-tail Entities
Filtering relevant documents with respect to entities is an essential task in
the context of knowledge base construction and maintenance. It entails
processing a time-ordered stream of documents that might be relevant to an
entity in order to select only those that contain vital information.
State-of-the-art approaches to document filtering for popular entities are
entity-dependent: they rely on and are also trained on the specifics of
differentiating features for each specific entity. Moreover, these approaches
tend to use so-called extrinsic information such as Wikipedia page views and
related entities which is typically only available only for popular head
entities. Entity-dependent approaches based on such signals are therefore
ill-suited as filtering methods for long-tail entities. In this paper we
propose a document filtering method for long-tail entities that is
entity-independent and thus also generalizes to unseen or rarely seen entities.
It is based on intrinsic features, i.e., features that are derived from the
documents in which the entities are mentioned. We propose a set of features
that capture informativeness, entity-saliency, and timeliness. In particular,
we introduce features based on entity aspect similarities, relation patterns,
and temporal expressions and combine these with standard features for document
filtering. Experiments following the TREC KBA 2014 setup on a publicly
available dataset show that our model is able to improve the filtering
performance for long-tail entities over several baselines. Results of applying
the model to unseen entities are promising, indicating that the model is able
to learn the general characteristics of a vital document. The overall
performance across all entities---i.e., not just long-tail entities---improves
upon the state-of-the-art without depending on any entity-specific training
data.Comment: CIKM2016, Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management. 201
Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
Dating Texts without Explicit Temporal Cues
This paper tackles temporal resolution of documents, such as determining when
a document is about or when it was written, based only on its text. We apply
techniques from information retrieval that predict dates via language models
over a discretized timeline. Unlike most previous works, we rely {\it solely}
on temporal cues implicit in the text. We consider both document-likelihood and
divergence based techniques and several smoothing methods for both of them. Our
best model predicts the mid-point of individuals' lives with a median of 22 and
mean error of 36 years for Wikipedia biographies from 3800 B.C. to the present
day. We also show that this approach works well when training on such
biographies and predicting dates both for non-biographical Wikipedia pages
about specific years (500 B.C. to 2010 A.D.) and for publication dates of short
stories (1798 to 2008). Together, our work shows that, even in absence of
temporal extraction resources, it is possible to achieve remarkable temporal
locality across a diverse set of texts
Entity Query Feature Expansion Using Knowledge Base Links
Recent advances in automatic entity linking and knowledge base
construction have resulted in entity annotations for document and
query collections. For example, annotations of entities from large
general purpose knowledge bases, such as Freebase and the Google
Knowledge Graph. Understanding how to leverage these entity
annotations of text to improve ad hoc document retrieval is an open
research area. Query expansion is a commonly used technique to
improve retrieval effectiveness. Most previous query expansion
approaches focus on text, mainly using unigram concepts. In this
paper, we propose a new technique, called entity query feature
expansion (EQFE) which enriches the query with features from
entities and their links to knowledge bases, including structured
attributes and text. We experiment using both explicit query entity
annotations and latent entities. We evaluate our technique on TREC
text collections automatically annotated with knowledge base entity
links, including the Google Freebase Annotations (FACC1) data.
We find that entity-based feature expansion results in significant
improvements in retrieval effectiveness over state-of-the-art text
expansion approaches
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