A framework for supporting knowledge representation – an ontological based approach

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresThe World Wide Web has had a tremendous impact on society and business in just a few years by making information instantly available. During this transition from physical to electronic means for information transport, the content and encoding of information has remained natural language and is only identified by its URL. Today, this is perhaps the most significant obstacle to streamlining business processes via the web. In order that processes may execute without human intervention, knowledge sources, such as documents, must become more machine understandable and must contain other information besides their main contents and URLs. The Semantic Web is a vision of a future web of machine-understandable data. On a machine understandable web, it will be possible for programs to easily determine what knowledge sources are about. This work introduces a conceptual framework and its implementation to support the classification and discovery of knowledge sources, supported by the above vision, where such sources’ information is structured and represented through a mathematical vector that semantically pinpoints the relevance of those knowledge sources within the domain of interest of each user. The presented work also addresses the enrichment of such knowledge representations, using the statistical relevance of keywords based on the classical vector space model concept, and extending it with ontological support, by using concepts and semantic relations, contained in a domain-specific ontology, to enrich knowledge sources’ semantic vectors. Semantic vectors are compared against each other, in order to obtain the similarity between them, and better support end users with knowledge source retrieval capabilities

Database Models and Data Formats

The deliverable describes data structure and XML formats that have been investigated and defined for data representation of linguistic and semantic resources underlying the KYOTO system

Exploring Data Hierarchies to Discover Knowledge in Different Domains

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Semi-automated Ontology Generation for Biocuration and Semantic Search

Background: In the life sciences, the amount of literature and experimental data grows at a tremendous rate. In order to effectively access and integrate these data, biomedical ontologies – controlled, hierarchical vocabularies – are being developed. Creating and maintaining such ontologies is a difficult, labour-intensive, manual process. Many computational methods which can support ontology construction have been proposed in the past. However, good, validated systems are largely missing. Motivation: The biocuration community plays a central role in the development of ontologies. Any method that can support their efforts has the potential to have a huge impact in the life sciences. Recently, a number of semantic search engines were created that make use of biomedical ontologies for document retrieval. To transfer the technology to other knowledge domains, suitable ontologies need to be created. One area where ontologies may prove particularly useful is the search for alternative methods to animal testing, an area where comprehensive search is of special interest to determine the availability or unavailability of alternative methods. Results: The Dresden Ontology Generator for Directed Acyclic Graphs (DOG4DAG) developed in this thesis is a system which supports the creation and extension of ontologies by semi-automatically generating terms, definitions, and parent-child relations from text in PubMed, the web, and PDF repositories. The system is seamlessly integrated into OBO-Edit and Protégé, two widely used ontology editors in the life sciences. DOG4DAG generates terms by identifying statistically significant noun-phrases in text. For definitions and parent-child relations it employs pattern-based web searches. Each generation step has been systematically evaluated using manually validated benchmarks. The term generation leads to high quality terms also found in manually created ontologies. Definitions can be retrieved for up to 78% of terms, child ancestor relations for up to 54%. No other validated system exists that achieves comparable results. To improve the search for information on alternative methods to animal testing an ontology has been developed that contains 17,151 terms of which 10% were newly created and 90% were re-used from existing resources. This ontology is the core of Go3R, the first semantic search engine in this field. When a user performs a search query with Go3R, the search engine expands this request using the structure and terminology of the ontology. The machine classification employed in Go3R is capable of distinguishing documents related to alternative methods from those which are not with an F-measure of 90% on a manual benchmark. Approximately 200,000 of the 19 million documents listed in PubMed were identified as relevant, either because a specific term was contained or due to the automatic classification. The Go3R search engine is available on-line under www.Go3R.org

Semi-automated Ontology Generation for Biocuration and Semantic Search

Background: In the life sciences, the amount of literature and experimental data grows at a tremendous rate. In order to effectively access and integrate these data, biomedical ontologies – controlled, hierarchical vocabularies – are being developed. Creating and maintaining such ontologies is a difficult, labour-intensive, manual process. Many computational methods which can support ontology construction have been proposed in the past. However, good, validated systems are largely missing. Motivation: The biocuration community plays a central role in the development of ontologies. Any method that can support their efforts has the potential to have a huge impact in the life sciences. Recently, a number of semantic search engines were created that make use of biomedical ontologies for document retrieval. To transfer the technology to other knowledge domains, suitable ontologies need to be created. One area where ontologies may prove particularly useful is the search for alternative methods to animal testing, an area where comprehensive search is of special interest to determine the availability or unavailability of alternative methods. Results: The Dresden Ontology Generator for Directed Acyclic Graphs (DOG4DAG) developed in this thesis is a system which supports the creation and extension of ontologies by semi-automatically generating terms, definitions, and parent-child relations from text in PubMed, the web, and PDF repositories. The system is seamlessly integrated into OBO-Edit and Protégé, two widely used ontology editors in the life sciences. DOG4DAG generates terms by identifying statistically significant noun-phrases in text. For definitions and parent-child relations it employs pattern-based web searches. Each generation step has been systematically evaluated using manually validated benchmarks. The term generation leads to high quality terms also found in manually created ontologies. Definitions can be retrieved for up to 78% of terms, child ancestor relations for up to 54%. No other validated system exists that achieves comparable results. To improve the search for information on alternative methods to animal testing an ontology has been developed that contains 17,151 terms of which 10% were newly created and 90% were re-used from existing resources. This ontology is the core of Go3R, the first semantic search engine in this field. When a user performs a search query with Go3R, the search engine expands this request using the structure and terminology of the ontology. The machine classification employed in Go3R is capable of distinguishing documents related to alternative methods from those which are not with an F-measure of 90% on a manual benchmark. Approximately 200,000 of the 19 million documents listed in PubMed were identified as relevant, either because a specific term was contained or due to the automatic classification. The Go3R search engine is available on-line under www.Go3R.org

Supporting Early Mission Concept Evaluation through Natural Language Processing

Proposal evaluation of pre-Phase A mission concepts is largely based on the input from subject matter experts who determine the scientific merit of a mission concept based on a number of criteria including: the relevance of the mission objectives to national and international priorities; the existence of a complete set of measurement, instrument, and platform requirements that are traceable to the mission objectives; and several others. The Science Traceability Matrix is a standard tool used to articulate this relevance and traceability and therefore is a key input to this reviewing process. However, inconsistencies in the structure and vocabulary used in the Science Traceability Matrix and other sections of the proposal across organizations make this process challenging and time-consuming. At the same time, as part of the Digital Engineering revolution, NASA and other space organizations are starting to embrace key concepts of model-based systems engineering and understand the value of moving from unstructured text documents to more formal knowledge representations that are amenable to automated data processing. In this line, this thesis leverages transformer models, a recent advance in natural language processing, to demonstrate automatic extraction of science relevance and traceability information from unstructured mission concept proposals. By doing so, this work helps pave the way for future applications of natural language processing to support other systems engineering practices within mission/program development such as automated parsing of design documentation. The proposed tool, called AstroNLP, is evaluated with a case study based on the Astrophysics Decadal Survey

Proceedings of the 2004 ONR Decision-Support Workshop Series: Interoperability

In August of 1998 the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) of the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), approached Dr. Phillip Abraham of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) with the proposal for an annual workshop focusing on emerging concepts in decision-support systems for military applications. The proposal was considered timely by the ONR Logistics Program Office for at least two reasons. First, rapid advances in information systems technology over the past decade had produced distributed collaborative computer-assistance capabilities with profound potential for providing meaningful support to military decision makers. Indeed, some systems based on these new capabilities such as the Integrated Marine Multi-Agent Command and Control System (IMMACCS) and the Integrated Computerized Deployment System (ICODES) had already reached the field-testing and final product stages, respectively. Second, over the past two decades the US Navy and Marine Corps had been increasingly challenged by missions demanding the rapid deployment of forces into hostile or devastate dterritories with minimum or non-existent indigenous support capabilities. Under these conditions Marine Corps forces had to rely mostly, if not entirely, on sea-based support and sustainment operations. Particularly today, operational strategies such as Operational Maneuver From The Sea (OMFTS) and Sea To Objective Maneuver (STOM) are very much in need of intelligent, near real-time and adaptive decision-support tools to assist military commanders and their staff under conditions of rapid change and overwhelming data loads. In the light of these developments the Logistics Program Office of ONR considered it timely to provide an annual forum for the interchange of ideas, needs and concepts that would address the decision-support requirements and opportunities in combined Navy and Marine Corps sea-based warfare and humanitarian relief operations. The first ONR Workshop was held April 20-22, 1999 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in San Luis Obispo, California. It focused on advances in technology with particular emphasis on an emerging family of powerful computer-based tools, and concluded that the most able members of this family of tools appear to be computer-based agents that are capable of communicating within a virtual environment of the real world. From 2001 onward the venue of the Workshop moved from the West Coast to Washington, and in 2003 the sponsorship was taken over by ONR’s Littoral Combat/Power Projection (FNC) Program Office (Program Manager: Mr. Barry Blumenthal). Themes and keynote speakers of past Workshops have included: 1999: ‘Collaborative Decision Making Tools’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); LtGen Paul Van Riper (USMC Ret.);Radm Leland Kollmorgen (USN Ret.); and, Dr. Gary Klein (KleinAssociates) 2000: ‘The Human-Computer Partnership in Decision-Support’ Dr. Ronald DeMarco (Associate Technical Director, ONR); Radm CharlesMunns; Col Robert Schmidle; and, Col Ray Cole (USMC Ret.) 2001: ‘Continuing the Revolution in Military Affairs’ Mr. Andrew Marshall (Director, Office of Net Assessment, OSD); and,Radm Jay M. Cohen (Chief of Naval Research, ONR) 2002: ‘Transformation ... ’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); and, Steve Cooper (CIO, Office ofHomeland Security) 2003: ‘Developing the New Infostructure’ Richard P. Lee (Assistant Deputy Under Secretary, OSD); and, MichaelO’Neil (Boeing) 2004: ‘Interoperability’ MajGen Bradley M. Lott (USMC), Deputy Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command; Donald Diggs, Director, C2 Policy, OASD (NII

A semantic framework for event-driven service composition

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on September 14, 2011VitaDissertation advisor: Yugyung LeeIncludes bibliographical references (p. 289-329)Thesis (Ph.D)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become a popular paradigm for designing distributed systems where loosely coupled services (i.e. computational entities) can be integrated seamlessly to provide complex composite services. Key challenges are discovery of the required services using their formal descriptions and their coherent composition in a timely manner. Most service descriptions are written in XML-based languages that are syntactic, creating linguistic ambiguity during service matchmaking. Furthermore, existing models that implement SOA have mostly middleware-controlled synchronous request/replybased runtime binding of services that incur undesirable service latency. In addition, they impose expensive state monitoring overhead on the middleware. Some newer event-driven models introduce asynchronous publish/subscribe-based event notifications to consumer applications and services. However, they require an event-library that stores definitions of all possible system events, which is impractical in an open and dynamic system. The objective of this study is to efficiently address on-demand consumer requests with minimum service latency and maximum consumer utility. It focuses on semantic eventdriven service composition. For efficient semantic service discovery, the dissertation proposes a novel service learning algorithm called Semantic Taxonomic Clustering (STC). The algorithm utilizes semantic service descriptions to cluster services into functional categories for pruning search space during service discovery and composition. STC utilizes a dynamic bit-encoding algorithm called DL-Encoding that enables linear time bit operationbased semantic matchmaking as compared to expensive reasoner-based semantic matchmaking. The algorithm shows significant improvement in performance and accuracy over some of the important service category algorithms reported in the literature. A novel user-friendly and computationally efficient query model called Desire-based Query Model (DQM) is proposed for formally specifying service queries. STC and DQM serve as the building block for the dual framework that is the core contribution of this dissertation: (i) centralized ALNet (Activity Logic Network) platform and (ii) distributed agentbased SMARTSPACE platform. The former incorporates a middleware controlled service composition algorithm called ALNetComposer while the latter includes the SmartDeal purely distributed composition algorithm. The query response accuracy and performance were evaluated for both the algorithms under simulated event-driven SOA environments. The experimental results show that various environmental parameters, such as domain diversity and scope, size and complexity of the SOA system, and dynamicity of the SOA system, significantly affect accuracy and performance of the proposed model. This dissertation demonstrates that the functionality and scalability of the proposed framework are acceptable for relatively static and domain specific environments as well as large, diverse, and highly dynamic environments. In summary, this dissertation addresses the key design issues and problems in the area of asynchronous and pro-active event-driven service composition.Introduction -- Research background -- Semantic service matchmaking & query modeling -- Service organization by learning service category -- ALNet: event-driven platform for service composition -- SMARTSPACE: distributed multi-agent based event-handeling -- Conclusion & future wor

TALK COMMONSENSE TO ME! ENRICHING LANGUAGE MODELS WITH COMMONSENSE KNOWLEDGE

Human cognition is exciting, it is a mesh up of several neural phenomena which really strive our ability to constantly reason and infer about the involving world. In cognitive computer science, Commonsense Reasoning is the terminology given to our ability to infer uncertain events and reason about Cognitive Knowledge. The introduction of Commonsense to intelligent systems has been for years desired, but the mechanism for this introduction remains a scientific jigsaw. Some, implicitly believe language understanding is enough to achieve some level of Commonsense [90]. In a less common ground, there are others who think enriching language with Knowledge Graphs might be enough for human-like reasoning [63], while there are others who believe human-like reasoning can only be truly captured with symbolic rules and logical deduction powered by Knowledge Bases, such as taxonomies and ontologies [50]. We focus on Commonsense Knowledge integration to Language Models, because we believe that this integration is a step towards a beneficial embedding of Commonsense Reasoning to interactive Intelligent Systems, such as conversational assistants. Conversational assistants, such as Alexa from Amazon, are user driven systems. Thus, giving birth to a more human-like interaction is strongly desired to really capture the user’s attention and empathy. We believe that such humanistic characteristics can be leveraged through the introduction of stronger Commonsense Knowledge and Reasoning to fruitfully engage with users. To this end, we intend to introduce a new family of models, the Relation-Aware BART (RA-BART), leveraging language generation abilities of BART [51] with explicit Commonsense Knowledge extracted from Commonsense Knowledge Graphs to further extend human capabilities on these models. We evaluate our model on three different tasks: Abstractive Question Answering, Text Generation conditioned on certain concepts and aMulti-Choice Question Answering task. We find out that, on generation tasks, RA-BART outperforms non-knowledge enriched models, however, it underperforms on the multi-choice question answering task. Our Project can be consulted in our open source, public GitHub repository (Explicit Commonsense).A cognição humana é entusiasmante, é uma malha de vários fenómenos neuronais que nos estimulam vivamente a capacidade de raciocinar e inferir constantemente sobre o mundo envolvente. Na ciência cognitiva computacional, o raciocínio de senso comum é a terminologia dada à nossa capacidade de inquirir sobre acontecimentos incertos e de raciocinar sobre o conhecimento cognitivo. A introdução do senso comum nos sistemas inteligentes é desejada há anos, mas o mecanismo para esta introdução continua a ser um quebra-cabeças científico. Alguns acreditam que apenas compreensão da linguagem é suficiente para alcançar o senso comum [90], num campo menos similar há outros que pensam que enriquecendo a linguagem com gráfos de conhecimento pode serum caminho para obter um raciocínio mais semelhante ao ser humano [63], enquanto que há outros ciêntistas que acreditam que o raciocínio humano só pode ser verdadeiramente capturado com regras simbólicas e deduções lógicas alimentadas por bases de conhecimento, como taxonomias e ontologias [50]. Concentramo-nos na integração de conhecimento de censo comum em Modelos Linguísticos, acreditando que esta integração é um passo no sentido de uma incorporação benéfica no racíocinio de senso comum em Sistemas Inteligentes Interactivos, como é o caso dos assistentes de conversação. Assistentes de conversação, como o Alexa da Amazon, são sistemas orientados aos utilizadores. Assim, dar origem a uma comunicação mais humana é fortemente desejada para captar realmente a atenção e a empatia do utilizador. Acreditamos que tais características humanísticas podem ser alavancadas por meio de uma introdução mais rica de conhecimento e raciocínio de senso comum de forma a proporcionar uma interação mais natural com o utilizador. Para tal, pretendemos introduzir uma nova família de modelos, o Relation-Aware BART (RA-BART), alavancando as capacidades de geração de linguagem do BART [51] com conhecimento de censo comum extraído a partir de grafos de conhecimento explícito de senso comum para alargar ainda mais as capacidades humanas nestes modelos. Avaliamos o nosso modelo em três tarefas distintas: Respostas a Perguntas Abstratas, Geração de Texto com base em conceitos e numa tarefa de Resposta a Perguntas de Escolha Múltipla . Descobrimos que, nas tarefas de geração, o RA-BART tem um desempenho superior aos modelos sem enriquecimento de conhecimento, contudo, tem um desempenho inferior na tarefa de resposta a perguntas de múltipla escolha. O nosso Projecto pode ser consultado no nosso repositório GitHub público, de código aberto (Explicit Commonsense)