233,995 research outputs found
Type-Constrained Representation Learning in Knowledge Graphs
Large knowledge graphs increasingly add value to various applications that
require machines to recognize and understand queries and their semantics, as in
search or question answering systems. Latent variable models have increasingly
gained attention for the statistical modeling of knowledge graphs, showing
promising results in tasks related to knowledge graph completion and cleaning.
Besides storing facts about the world, schema-based knowledge graphs are backed
by rich semantic descriptions of entities and relation-types that allow
machines to understand the notion of things and their semantic relationships.
In this work, we study how type-constraints can generally support the
statistical modeling with latent variable models. More precisely, we integrated
prior knowledge in form of type-constraints in various state of the art latent
variable approaches. Our experimental results show that prior knowledge on
relation-types significantly improves these models up to 77% in link-prediction
tasks. The achieved improvements are especially prominent when a low model
complexity is enforced, a crucial requirement when these models are applied to
very large datasets. Unfortunately, type-constraints are neither always
available nor always complete e.g., they can become fuzzy when entities lack
proper typing. We show that in these cases, it can be beneficial to apply a
local closed-world assumption that approximates the semantics of relation-types
based on observations made in the data
Tree ensemble kernels for Bayesian optimization with known constraints over mixed-feature spaces
Tree ensembles can be well-suited for black-box optimization tasks such as
algorithm tuning and neural architecture search, as they achieve good
predictive performance with little or no manual tuning, naturally handle
discrete feature spaces, and are relatively insensitive to outliers in the
training data. Two well-known challenges in using tree ensembles for black-box
optimization are (i) effectively quantifying model uncertainty for exploration
and (ii) optimizing over the piece-wise constant acquisition function. To
address both points simultaneously, we propose using the kernel interpretation
of tree ensembles as a Gaussian Process prior to obtain model variance
estimates, and we develop a compatible optimization formulation for the
acquisition function. The latter further allows us to seamlessly integrate
known constraints to improve sampling efficiency by considering
domain-knowledge in engineering settings and modeling search space symmetries,
e.g., hierarchical relationships in neural architecture search. Our framework
performs as well as state-of-the-art methods for unconstrained black-box
optimization over continuous/discrete features and outperforms competing
methods for problems combining mixed-variable feature spaces and known input
constraints.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures, 4 table
Advances in nowcasting influenza-like illness rates using search query logs
User-generated content can assist epidemiological surveillance in the early detection and prevalence estimation of infectious diseases, such as influenza. Google Flu Trends embodies the first public platform for transforming search queries to indications about the current state of flu in various places all over the world. However, the original model significantly mispredicted influenza-like illness rates in the US during the 2012–13 flu season. In this work, we build on the previous modeling attempt, proposing substantial improvements. Firstly, we investigate the performance of a widely used linear regularized regression solver, known as the Elastic Net. Then, we expand on this model by incorporating the queries selected by the Elastic Net into a nonlinear regression framework, based on a composite Gaussian Process. Finally, we augment the query-only predictions with an autoregressive model, injecting prior knowledge about the disease. We assess predictive performance using five consecutive flu seasons spanning from 2008 to 2013 and qualitatively explain certain shortcomings of the previous approach. Our results indicate that a nonlinear query modeling approach delivers the lowest cumulative nowcasting error, and also suggest that query information significantly improves autoregressive inferences, obtaining state-of-the-art performance
Exploiting prior knowledge and latent variable representations for the statistical modeling and probabilistic querying of large knowledge graphs
Large knowledge graphs increasingly add great value to various applications that require machines to recognize and understand queries and their semantics, as in search or question answering systems. These applications include Google search, Bing search, IBM’s Watson, but also smart mobile assistants as Apple’s Siri, Google Now or Microsoft’s Cortana. Popular knowledge graphs like DBpedia, YAGO or Freebase store a broad range of facts about the world, to a large extent derived from Wikipedia, currently the biggest web encyclopedia. In addition to these freely accessible open knowledge graphs, commercial ones have also evolved including the well-known Google Knowledge Graph or Microsoft’s Satori. Since incompleteness and veracity of knowledge graphs are known problems, the statistical modeling of knowledge graphs has increasingly gained attention in recent years. Some of the leading approaches are based on latent variable models which show both excellent predictive performance and scalability. Latent variable models learn embedding representations of domain entities and relations (representation learning). From these embeddings, priors for every possible fact in the knowledge graph are generated which can be exploited for data cleansing, completion or as prior knowledge to support triple extraction from unstructured textual data as successfully demonstrated by Google’s Knowledge-Vault project. However, large knowledge graphs impose constraints on the complexity of the latent embeddings learned by these models. For graphs with millions of entities and thousands of relation-types, latent variable models are required to exploit low dimensional embeddings for entities and relation-types to be tractable when applied to these graphs. The work described in this thesis extends the application of latent variable models for large knowledge graphs in three important dimensions. First, it is shown how the integration of ontological constraints on the domain and range of relation-types enables latent variable models to exploit latent embeddings of reduced complexity for modeling large knowledge graphs. The integration of this prior knowledge into the models leads to a substantial increase both in predictive performance and scalability with improvements of up to 77% in link-prediction tasks. Since manually designed domain and range constraints can be absent or fuzzy, we also propose and study an alternative approach based on a local closed-world assumption, which derives domain and range constraints from observed data without the need of prior knowledge extracted from the curated schema of the knowledge graph. We show that such an approach also leads to similar significant improvements in modeling quality. Further, we demonstrate that these two types of domain and range constraints are of general value to latent variable models by integrating and evaluating them on the current state of the art of latent variable models represented by RESCAL, Translational Embedding, and the neural network approach used by the recently proposed Google Knowledge Vault system. In the second part of the thesis it is shown that the just mentioned three approaches all perform well, but do not share many commonalities in the way they model knowledge graphs. These differences can be exploited in ensemble solutions which improve the predictive performance even further. The third part of the thesis concerns the efficient querying of the statistically modeled knowledge graphs. This thesis interprets statistically modeled knowledge graphs as probabilistic databases, where the latent variable models define a probability distribution for triples. From this perspective, link-prediction is equivalent to querying ground triples which is a standard functionality of the latent variable models. For more complex querying that involves e.g. joins and projections, the theory on probabilistic databases provides evaluation rules. In this thesis it is shown how the intrinsic features of latent variable models can be combined with the theory of probabilistic databases to realize efficient probabilistic querying of the modeled graphs
Active Object Localization in Visual Situations
We describe a method for performing active localization of objects in
instances of visual situations. A visual situation is an abstract
concept---e.g., "a boxing match", "a birthday party", "walking the dog",
"waiting for a bus"---whose image instantiations are linked more by their
common spatial and semantic structure than by low-level visual similarity. Our
system combines given and learned knowledge of the structure of a particular
situation, and adapts that knowledge to a new situation instance as it actively
searches for objects. More specifically, the system learns a set of probability
distributions describing spatial and other relationships among relevant
objects. The system uses those distributions to iteratively sample object
proposals on a test image, but also continually uses information from those
object proposals to adaptively modify the distributions based on what the
system has detected. We test our approach's ability to efficiently localize
objects, using a situation-specific image dataset created by our group. We
compare the results with several baselines and variations on our method, and
demonstrate the strong benefit of using situation knowledge and active
context-driven localization. Finally, we contrast our method with several other
approaches that use context as well as active search for object localization in
images.Comment: 14 page
Knowledge-based Query Expansion in Real-Time Microblog Search
Since the length of microblog texts, such as tweets, is strictly limited to
140 characters, traditional Information Retrieval techniques suffer from the
vocabulary mismatch problem severely and cannot yield good performance in the
context of microblogosphere. To address this critical challenge, in this paper,
we propose a new language modeling approach for microblog retrieval by
inferring various types of context information. In particular, we expand the
query using knowledge terms derived from Freebase so that the expanded one can
better reflect users' search intent. Besides, in order to further satisfy
users' real-time information need, we incorporate temporal evidences into the
expansion method, which can boost recent tweets in the retrieval results with
respect to a given topic. Experimental results on two official TREC Twitter
corpora demonstrate the significant superiority of our approach over baseline
methods.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure
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