Academic team formation as evolving hypergraphs

This paper quantitatively explores the social and socio-semantic patterns of constitution of academic collaboration teams. To this end, we broadly underline two critical features of social networks of knowledge-based collaboration: first, they essentially consist of group-level interactions which call for team-centered approaches. Formally, this induces the use of hypergraphs and n-adic interactions, rather than traditional dyadic frameworks of interaction such as graphs, binding only pairs of agents. Second, we advocate the joint consideration of structural and semantic features, as collaborations are allegedly constrained by both of them. Considering these provisions, we propose a framework which principally enables us to empirically test a series of hypotheses related to academic team formation patterns. In particular, we exhibit and characterize the influence of an implicit group structure driving recurrent team formation processes. On the whole, innovative production does not appear to be correlated with more original teams, while a polarization appears between groups composed of experts only or non-experts only, altogether corresponding to collectives with a high rate of repeated interactions

Document highlighting - message classification in printed business letters

This paper presents the INFOCLAS system applying statistical methods of information retrieval primarily for the classification of German business letters into corresponding message types such as order, offer, confirmation, etc. INFOCLAS is a first step towards understanding of documents. Actually, it is composed of three modules: the central indexer (extraction and weighting of indexing terms), the classifier (classification of business letters into given types) and the focuser (highlighting relevant letter parts). The system employs several knowledge sources including a database of about 100 letters, word frequency statistics for German, message type specific words, morphological knowledge as well as the underlying document model. As output, the system evaluates a set of weighted hypotheses about the type of letter at hand, or highlights relevant text (text focus), respectively. Classification of documents allows the automatic distribution or archiving of letters and is also an excellent starting point for higher-level document analysis

Distributional Tensor Space Model of Natural Language Semantics

We propose a novel Distributional Tensor Space Model of natural language semantics employing 3d order tensors that accounts for order dependent word contexts and assigns to words characteristic matrices such that semantic composition can be realized in a linguistically and cognitively plausible way. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results for important tasks of linguistic semantics by using a relatively small text corpus and without any sophisticated preprocessing

Distributed Representations for Compositional Semantics

The mathematical representation of semantics is a key issue for Natural Language Processing (NLP). A lot of research has been devoted to finding ways of representing the semantics of individual words in vector spaces. Distributional approaches --- meaning distributed representations that exploit co-occurrence statistics of large corpora --- have proved popular and successful across a number of tasks. However, natural language usually comes in structures beyond the word level, with meaning arising not only from the individual words but also the structure they are contained in at the phrasal or sentential level. Modelling the compositional process by which the meaning of an utterance arises from the meaning of its parts is an equally fundamental task of NLP. This dissertation explores methods for learning distributed semantic representations and models for composing these into representations for larger linguistic units. Our underlying hypothesis is that neural models are a suitable vehicle for learning semantically rich representations and that such representations in turn are suitable vehicles for solving important tasks in natural language processing. The contribution of this thesis is a thorough evaluation of our hypothesis, as part of which we introduce several new approaches to representation learning and compositional semantics, as well as multiple state-of-the-art models which apply distributed semantic representations to various tasks in NLP.Comment: DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, Submitted and accepted in 201

Composing Measures for Computing Text Similarity

We present a comprehensive study of computing similarity between texts. We start from the observation that while the concept of similarity is well grounded in psychology, text similarity is much less well-defined in the natural language processing community. We thus define the notion of text similarity and distinguish it from related tasks such as textual entailment and near-duplicate detection. We then identify multiple text dimensions, i.e. characteristics inherent to texts that can be used to judge text similarity, for which we provide empirical evidence. We discuss state-of-the-art text similarity measures previously proposed in the literature, before continuing with a thorough discussion of common evaluation metrics and datasets. Based on the analysis, we devise an architecture which combines text similarity measures in a unified classification framework. We apply our system in two evaluation settings, for which it consistently outperforms prior work and competing systems: (a) an intrinsic evaluation in the context of the Semantic Textual Similarity Task as part of the Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) exercises, and (b) an extrinsic evaluation for the detection of text reuse. As a basis for future work, we introduce DKPro Similarity, an open source software package which streamlines the development of text similarity measures and complete experimental setups

A Machine Learning Approach for Plagiarism Detection

Plagiarism detection is gaining increasing importance due to requirements for integrity in education. The existing research has investigated the problem of plagrarim detection with a varying degree of success. The literature revealed that there are two main methods for detecting plagiarism, namely extrinsic and intrinsic. This thesis has developed two novel approaches to address both of these methods. Firstly a novel extrinsic method for detecting plagiarism is proposed. The method is based on four well-known techniques namely Bag of Words (BOW), Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Stylometry and Support Vector Machines (SVM). The LSA application was fine-tuned to take in the stylometric features (most common words) in order to characterise the document authorship as described in chapter 4. The results revealed that LSA based stylometry has outperformed the traditional LSA application. Support vector machine based algorithms were used to perform the classification procedure in order to predict which author has written a particular book being tested. The proposed method has successfully addressed the limitations of semantic characteristics and identified the document source by assigning the book being tested to the right author in most cases. Secondly, the intrinsic detection method has relied on the use of the statistical properties of the most common words. LSA was applied in this method to a group of most common words (MCWs) to extract their usage patterns based on the transitivity property of LSA. The feature sets of the intrinsic model were based on the frequency of the most common words, their relative frequencies in series, and the deviation of these frequencies across all books for a particular author. The Intrinsic method aims to generate a model of author “style” by revealing a set of certain features of authorship. The model’s generation procedure focuses on just one author as an attempt to summarise aspects of an author’s style in a definitive and clear-cut manner. The thesis has also proposed a novel experimental methodology for testing the performance of both extrinsic and intrinsic methods for plagiarism detection. This methodology relies upon the CEN (Corpus of English Novels) training dataset, but divides that dataset up into training and test datasets in a novel manner. Both approaches have been evaluated using the well-known leave-one-out-cross-validation method. Results indicated that by integrating deep analysis (LSA) and Stylometric analysis, hidden changes can be identified whether or not a reference collection exists

Semantic Interpretation of User Queries for Question Answering on Interlinked Data

The Web of Data contains a wealth of knowledge belonging to a large number of domains. Retrieving data from such precious interlinked knowledge bases is an issue. By taking the structure of data into account, it is expected that upcoming generation of search engines is approaching to question answering systems, which directly answer user questions. But developing a question answering over these interlinked data sources is still challenging because of two inherent characteristics: First, different datasets employ heterogeneous schemas and each one may only contain a part of the answer for a certain question. Second, constructing a federated formal query across different datasets requires exploiting links between these datasets on both the schema and instance levels. In this respect, several challenges such as resource disambiguation, vocabulary mismatch, inference, link traversal are raised. In this dissertation, we address these challenges in order to build a question answering system for Linked Data. We present our question answering system Sina, which transforms user-supplied queries (i.e. either natural language queries or keyword queries) into conjunctive SPARQL queries over a set of interlinked data sources. The contributions of this work are as follows: 1. A novel approach for determining the most suitable resources for a user-supplied query from different datasets (disambiguation approach). We employed a Hidden Markov Model, whose parameters were bootstrapped with different distribution functions. 2. A novel method for constructing federated formal queries using the disambiguated resources and leveraging the linking structure of the underlying datasets. This approach essentially relies on a combination of domain and range inference as well as a link traversal method for constructing a connected graph, which ultimately renders a corresponding SPARQL query. 3. Regarding the problem of vocabulary mismatch, our contribution is divided into two parts, First, we introduce a number of new query expansion features based on semantic and linguistic inferencing over Linked Data. We evaluate the effectiveness of each feature individually as well as their combinations, employing Support Vector Machines and Decision Trees. Second, we propose a novel method for automatic query expansion, which employs a Hidden Markov Model to obtain the optimal tuples of derived words. 4. We provide two benchmarks for two different tasks to the community of question answering systems. The first one is used for the task of question answering on interlinked datasets (i.e. federated queries over Linked Data). The second one is used for the vocabulary mismatch task. We evaluate the accuracy of our approach using measures like mean reciprocal rank, precision, recall, and F-measure on three interlinked life-science datasets as well as DBpedia. The results of our accuracy evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, we study the runtime of our approach in its sequential as well as parallel implementations and draw conclusions on the scalability of our approach on Linked Data

Automatic text summarization with Maximal Frequent Sequences

En las últimas dos décadas un aumento exponencial de la información electrónica ha provocado una gran necesidad de entender rápidamente grandes volúmenes de información. En este libro se desarrollan los métodos automáticos para producir un resumen. Un resumen es un texto corto que transmite la información más importante de un documento o de una colección de documentos. Los resúmenes utilizados en este libro son extractivos: una selección de las oraciones más importantes del texto. Otros retos consisten en generar resúmenes de manera independiente de lenguaje y dominio. Se describe la identificación de cuatro etapas para generación de resúmenes extractivos. La primera etapa es la selección de términos, en la que uno tiene que decidir qué unidades contarían como términos individuales. El proceso de estimación de la utilidad de los términos individuales se llama etapa de pesado de términos. El siguiente paso se denota como pesado de oraciones, donde todas las secuencias reciben alguna medida numérica de acuerdo con la utilidad de términos. Finalmente, el proceso de selección de las oraciones más importantes se llama selección de oraciones. Los diferentes métodos para generación de resúmenes extractivos pueden ser caracterizados como representan estas etapas. En este libro se describe la etapa de selección de términos, en la que la detección de descripciones multipalabra se realiza considerando Secuencias Frecuentes Maximales (sfms), las cuales adquieren un significado importante, mientras Secuencias Frecuentes (sf) no maximales, que son partes de otros sf, no deben de ser consideradas. En la motivación se consideró costo vs. beneficio: existen muchas sf no maximales, mientras que la probabilidad de adquirir un significado importante es baja. De todos modos, las sfms representan todas las sfs en el modo compacto: todas las sfs podrían ser obtenidas a partir de todas las sfms explotando cada sfm al conjunto de todas sus subsecuencias. Se presentan los nuevos métodos basados en grafos, algoritmos de agrupamiento y algoritmos genéticos, los cuales facilitan la tarea de generación de resúmenes de textos. Se ha experimentado diferentes combinaciones de las opciones de selección de términos, pesado de términos, pesado de oraciones y selección de oraciones para generar los resúmenes extractivos de textos independientes de lenguaje y dominio para una colección de noticias. Se ha analizado algunas opciones basadas en descripciones multipalabra considerándolas en los métodos de grafos, algoritmos de agrupamiento y algoritmos genéticos. Se han obtenido los resultados superiores al de estado de arte. Este libro está dirigido a los estudiantes y científicos del área de Lingüística Computacional, y también a quienes quieren saber sobre los recientes avances en las investigaciones de generación automática de resúmenes de textos.In the last two decades, an exponential increase in the available electronic information causes a big necessity to quickly understand large volumes of information. It raises the importance of the development of automatic methods for detecting the most relevant content of a document in order to produce a shorter text. Automatic Text Summarization (ats) is an active research area dedicated to generate abstractive and extractive summaries not only for a single document, but also for a collection of documents. Other necessity consists in finding method for ats in a language and domain independent way. In this book we consider extractive text summarization for single document task. We have identified that a typical extractive summarization method consists in four steps. First step is a term selection where one should decide what units will count as individual terms. The process of estimating the usefulness of the individual terms is called term weighting step. The next step denotes as sentence weighting where all the sentences receive some numerical measure according to the usefulness of its terms. Finally, the process of selecting the most relevant sentences calls sentence selection. Different extractive summarization methods can be characterized how they perform these steps. In this book, in the term selection step, we describe how to detect multiword descriptions considering Maximal Frequent Sequences (mfss), which bearing important meaning, while non-maximal frequent sequences (fss), those that are parts of another fs, should not be considered. Our additional motivation was cost vs. benefit considerations: there are too many non-maximal fss while their probability to bear important meaning is lower. In any case, mfss represent all fss in a compact way: all fss can be obtained from all mfss by bursting each mfs into a set of all its subsequences.New methods based on graph algorithms, genetic algorithms, and clustering algorithms which facilitate the text summarization task are presented. We have tested different combinations of term selection, term weighting, sentence weighting and sentence selection options for language-and domain-independent extractive single-document text summarization on a news report collection. We analyzed several options based on mfss, considering them with graph, genetic, and clustering algorithms. We obtained results superior to the existing state-ofthe- art methods. This book is addressed for students and scientists of the area of Computational Linguistics, and also who wants to know recent developments in the area of Automatic Text Generation of Summaries