65,248 research outputs found
Event-based Access to Historical Italian War Memoirs
The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often
domain specific, textual resources that report on facts and events which have
happened in the past; among these, memoirs are a very common type of primary
source. In this paper, we present an approach for extracting information from
Italian historical war memoirs and turning it into structured knowledge. This
is based on the semantic notions of events, participants and roles. We evaluate
quantitatively each of the key-steps of our approach and provide a graph-based
representation of the extracted knowledge, which allows to move between a Close
and a Distant Reading of the collection.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure
WordFences: Text localization and recognition
En col·laboració amb la Universitat de Barcelona (UB) i la Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV)In recent years, text recognition has achieved remarkable success in recognizing scanned
document text. However, word recognition in natural images is still an open problem,
which generally requires time consuming post-processing steps. We present a novel architecture
for individual word detection in scene images based on semantic segmentation.
Our contributions are twofold: the concept of WordFence, which detects border areas
surrounding each individual word and a unique pixelwise weighted softmax loss function
which penalizes background and emphasizes small text regions. WordFence ensures that
each word is detected individually, and the new loss function provides a strong training
signal to both text and word border localization. The proposed technique avoids intensive
post-processing by combining semantic word segmentation with a voting scheme
for merging segmentations of multiple scales, producing an end-to-end word detection
system. We achieve superior localization recall on common benchmark datasets - 92%
recall on ICDAR11 and ICDAR13 and 63% recall on SVT. Furthermore, end-to-end
word recognition achieves state-of-the-art 86% F-Score on ICDAR13
Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto.
Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas, including information management, representation and understanding. Neurocognitive informatics is a new, emerging field that should help to improve the matching of artificial and natural systems, and inspire better computational algorithms to solve problems that are still beyond the reach of machines. In this position paper examples of neurocognitive inspirations and promising directions in this area are given
Negative Statements Considered Useful
Knowledge bases (KBs), pragmatic collections of knowledge about notable entities, are an important asset in applications such as search, question answering and dialogue. Rooted in a long tradition in knowledge representation, all popular KBs only store positive information, while they abstain from taking any stance towards statements not contained in them. In this paper, we make the case for explicitly stating interesting statements which are not true. Negative statements would be important to overcome current limitations of question answering, yet due to their potential abundance, any effort towards compiling them needs a tight coupling with ranking. We introduce two approaches towards compiling negative statements. (i) In peer-based statistical inferences, we compare entities with highly related entities in order to derive potential negative statements, which we then rank using supervised and unsupervised features. (ii) In query-log-based text extraction, we use a pattern-based approach for harvesting search engine query logs. Experimental results show that both approaches hold promising and complementary potential. Along with this paper, we publish the first datasets on interesting negative information, containing over 1.1M statements for 100K popular Wikidata entities
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