A Natural Language Processing Based Internet Agent

Searching for useful information is a difficult job by the virtue of the information overloading problem. With technological advances, notably the World-Wide Web (WWW), it allows every ordinary information owner to offer information online for others to access and retrieve. However, it also makes up a global information system that is extremely large-scale, diverse and dynamic. Internet agents and Internet search engines have been used to deal with such problems. But the search results are usually not quite relevant to what a user wants since most of them use simple keyword matching. In this paper, we propose a natural language processing based agent (NIAGENT) that understands a user's natural query. NIAGENT not only cooperates with a meta Internet search engine in order to increase recall of web pages but also analyzes the contents of the referenced documents to increase precision. Moreover, the proposed agent is autonomous, light-weight, and multithreaded. The architectural design also represents an interesting application of a distributed and cooperative computing paradigm. A prototype of NIAGENT, implemented in Java, shows its promise to find more useful information than keyword based searching.published_or_final_versio

Deriving query suggestions for site search

Modern search engines have been moving away from simplistic interfaces that aimed at satisfying a user's need with a single-shot query. Interactive features are now integral parts of web search engines. However, generating good query modification suggestions remains a challenging issue. Query log analysis is one of the major strands of work in this direction. Although much research has been performed on query logs collected on the web as a whole, query log analysis to enhance search on smaller and more focused collections has attracted less attention, despite its increasing practical importance. In this article, we report on a systematic study of different query modification methods applied to a substantial query log collected on a local website that already uses an interactive search engine. We conducted experiments in which we asked users to assess the relevance of potential query modification suggestions that have been constructed using a range of log analysis methods and different baseline approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of log analysis to extract query modification suggestions. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that a more fine-grained approach than grouping search requests into sessions allows for extraction of better refinement terms from query log files. © 2013 ASIS&T

Artequakt: Generating tailored biographies from automatically annotated fragments from the web

The Artequakt project seeks to automatically generate narrativebiographies of artists from knowledge that has been extracted from the Web and maintained in a knowledge base. An overview of the system architecture is presented here and the three key components of that architecture are explained in detail, namely knowledge extraction, information management and biography construction. Conclusions are drawn from the initial experiences of the project and future progress is detailed

Using Linguistic Analysis to Translate Arabic Natural Language Queries to SPARQL

The logic-based machine-understandable framework of the Semantic Web often challenges naive users when they try to query ontology-based knowledge bases. Existing research efforts have approached this problem by introducing Natural Language (NL) interfaces to ontologies. These NL interfaces have the ability to construct SPARQL queries based on NL user queries. However, most efforts were restricted to queries expressed in English, and they often benefited from the advancement of English NLP tools. However, little research has been done to support querying the Arabic content on the Semantic Web by using NL queries. This paper presents a domain-independent approach to translate Arabic NL queries to SPARQL by leveraging linguistic analysis. Based on a special consideration on Noun Phrases (NPs), our approach uses a language parser to extract NPs and the relations from Arabic parse trees and match them to the underlying ontology. It then utilizes knowledge in the ontology to group NPs into triple-based representations. A SPARQL query is finally generated by extracting targets and modifiers, and interpreting them into SPARQL. The interpretation of advanced semantic features including negation, conjunctive and disjunctive modifiers is also supported. The approach was evaluated by using two datasets consisting of OWL test data and queries, and the obtained results have confirmed its feasibility to translate Arabic NL queries to SPARQL.Comment: Journal Pape

Advanced Semantics for Commonsense Knowledge Extraction

Commonsense knowledge (CSK) about concepts and their properties is useful for AI applications such as robust chatbots. Prior works like ConceptNet, TupleKB and others compiled large CSK collections, but are restricted in their expressiveness to subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples with simple concepts for S and monolithic strings for P and O. Also, these projects have either prioritized precision or recall, but hardly reconcile these complementary goals. This paper presents a methodology, called Ascent, to automatically build a large-scale knowledge base (KB) of CSK assertions, with advanced expressiveness and both better precision and recall than prior works. Ascent goes beyond triples by capturing composite concepts with subgroups and aspects, and by refining assertions with semantic facets. The latter are important to express temporal and spatial validity of assertions and further qualifiers. Ascent combines open information extraction with judicious cleaning using language models. Intrinsic evaluation shows the superior size and quality of the Ascent KB, and an extrinsic evaluation for QA-support tasks underlines the benefits of Ascent.Comment: Web interface available at https://ascent.mpi-inf.mpg.d

Advanced Semantics for Commonsense Knowledge Extraction

Commonsense knowledge (CSK) about concepts and their properties is useful for AI applications such as robust chatbots. Prior works like ConceptNet, TupleKB and others compiled large CSK collections, but are restricted in their expressiveness to subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples with simple concepts for S and monolithic strings for P and O. Also, these projects have either prioritized precision or recall, but hardly reconcile these complementary goals. This paper presents a methodology, called Ascent, to automatically build a large-scale knowledge base (KB) of CSK assertions, with advanced expressiveness and both better precision and recall than prior works. Ascent goes beyond triples by capturing composite concepts with subgroups and aspects, and by refining assertions with semantic facets. The latter are important to express temporal and spatial validity of assertions and further qualifiers. Ascent combines open information extraction with judicious cleaning using language models. Intrinsic evaluation shows the superior size and quality of the Ascent KB, and an extrinsic evaluation for QA-support tasks underlines the benefits of Ascent

Knowledge will Propel Machine Understanding of Content: Extrapolating from Current Examples

Machine Learning has been a big success story during the AI resurgence. One particular stand out success relates to learning from a massive amount of data. In spite of early assertions of the unreasonable effectiveness of data, there is increasing recognition for utilizing knowledge whenever it is available or can be created purposefully. In this paper, we discuss the indispensable role of knowledge for deeper understanding of content where (i) large amounts of training data are unavailable, (ii) the objects to be recognized are complex, (e.g., implicit entities and highly subjective content), and (iii) applications need to use complementary or related data in multiple modalities/media. What brings us to the cusp of rapid progress is our ability to (a) create relevant and reliable knowledge and (b) carefully exploit knowledge to enhance ML/NLP techniques. Using diverse examples, we seek to foretell unprecedented progress in our ability for deeper understanding and exploitation of multimodal data and continued incorporation of knowledge in learning techniques.Comment: Pre-print of the paper accepted at 2017 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1610.0770