XML Matchers: approaches and challenges

Schema Matching, i.e. the process of discovering semantic correspondences between concepts adopted in different data source schemas, has been a key topic in Database and Artificial Intelligence research areas for many years. In the past, it was largely investigated especially for classical database models (e.g., E/R schemas, relational databases, etc.). However, in the latest years, the widespread adoption of XML in the most disparate application fields pushed a growing number of researchers to design XML-specific Schema Matching approaches, called XML Matchers, aiming at finding semantic matchings between concepts defined in DTDs and XSDs. XML Matchers do not just take well-known techniques originally designed for other data models and apply them on DTDs/XSDs, but they exploit specific XML features (e.g., the hierarchical structure of a DTD/XSD) to improve the performance of the Schema Matching process. The design of XML Matchers is currently a well-established research area. The main goal of this paper is to provide a detailed description and classification of XML Matchers. We first describe to what extent the specificities of DTDs/XSDs impact on the Schema Matching task. Then we introduce a template, called XML Matcher Template, that describes the main components of an XML Matcher, their role and behavior. We illustrate how each of these components has been implemented in some popular XML Matchers. We consider our XML Matcher Template as the baseline for objectively comparing approaches that, at first glance, might appear as unrelated. The introduction of this template can be useful in the design of future XML Matchers. Finally, we analyze commercial tools implementing XML Matchers and introduce two challenging issues strictly related to this topic, namely XML source clustering and uncertainty management in XML Matchers.Comment: 34 pages, 8 tables, 7 figure

SiGMa: Simple Greedy Matching for Aligning Large Knowledge Bases

The Internet has enabled the creation of a growing number of large-scale knowledge bases in a variety of domains containing complementary information. Tools for automatically aligning these knowledge bases would make it possible to unify many sources of structured knowledge and answer complex queries. However, the efficient alignment of large-scale knowledge bases still poses a considerable challenge. Here, we present Simple Greedy Matching (SiGMa), a simple algorithm for aligning knowledge bases with millions of entities and facts. SiGMa is an iterative propagation algorithm which leverages both the structural information from the relationship graph as well as flexible similarity measures between entity properties in a greedy local search, thus making it scalable. Despite its greedy nature, our experiments indicate that SiGMa can efficiently match some of the world's largest knowledge bases with high precision. We provide additional experiments on benchmark datasets which demonstrate that SiGMa can outperform state-of-the-art approaches both in accuracy and efficiency.Comment: 10 pages + 2 pages appendix; 5 figures -- initial preprin

An Algorithmic Proof of the Lovasz Local Lemma via Resampling Oracles

The Lovasz Local Lemma is a seminal result in probabilistic combinatorics. It gives a sufficient condition on a probability space and a collection of events for the existence of an outcome that simultaneously avoids all of those events. Finding such an outcome by an efficient algorithm has been an active research topic for decades. Breakthrough work of Moser and Tardos (2009) presented an efficient algorithm for a general setting primarily characterized by a product structure on the probability space. In this work we present an efficient algorithm for a much more general setting. Our main assumption is that there exist certain functions, called resampling oracles, that can be invoked to address the undesired occurrence of the events. We show that, in all scenarios to which the original Lovasz Local Lemma applies, there exist resampling oracles, although they are not necessarily efficient. Nevertheless, for essentially all known applications of the Lovasz Local Lemma and its generalizations, we have designed efficient resampling oracles. As applications of these techniques, we present new results for packings of Latin transversals, rainbow matchings and rainbow spanning trees.Comment: 47 page

Representation learning on relational data

Humans utilize information about relationships or interactions between objects for orientation in various situations. For example, we trust our friend circle recommendations, become friends with the people we already have shared friends with, or adapt opinions as a result of interactions with other people. In many Machine Learning applications, we also know about relationships, which bear essential information for the use-case. Recommendations in social media, scene understanding in computer vision, or traffic prediction are few examples where relationships play a crucial role in the application. In this thesis, we introduce methods taking relationships into account and demonstrate their benefits for various problems. A large number of problems, where relationship information plays a central role, can be approached by modeling data by a graph structure and by task formulation as a prediction problem on the graph. In the first part of the thesis, we tackle the problem of node classification from various directions. We start with unsupervised learning approaches, which differ by assumptions they make about the relationship's meaning in the graph. For some applications such as social networks, it is a feasible assumption that densely connected nodes are similar. On the other hand, if we want to predict passenger traffic for the airport based on its flight connections, similar nodes are not necessarily positioned close to each other in the graph and more likely have comparable neighborhood patterns. Furthermore, we introduce novel methods for classification and regression in a semi-supervised setting, where labels of interest are known for a fraction of nodes. We use the known prediction targets and information about how nodes connect to learn the relationships' meaning and their effect on the final prediction. In the second part of the thesis, we deal with the problem of graph matching. Our first use-case is the alignment of different geographical maps, where the focus lies on the real-life setting. We introduce a robust method that can learn to ignore the noise in the data. Next, our focus moves to the field of Entity Alignment in different Knowledge Graphs. We analyze the process of manual data annotation and propose a setting and algorithms to accelerate this labor-intensive process. Furthermore, we point to the several shortcomings in the empirical evaluations, make several suggestions on how to improve it, and extensively analyze existing approaches for the task. The next part of the thesis is dedicated to the research direction dealing with automatic extraction and search of arguments, known as Argument Mining. We propose a novel approach for identifying arguments and demonstrate how it can make use of relational information. We apply our method to identify arguments in peer-reviews for scientific publications and show that arguments are essential for the decision process. Furthermore, we address the problem of argument search and introduce a novel approach that retrieves relevant and original arguments for the user's queries. Finally, we propose an approach for subspace clustering, which can deal with large datasets and assign new objects to the found clusters. Our method learns the relationships between objects and performs the clustering on the resulting graph

Structure and content semantic similarity detection of eXtensible markup language documents using keys

XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) has become the fundamental standard for efficient data management and exchange. Due to the widespread use of XML for describing and exchanging data on the web, XML-based comparison is central issues in database management and information retrieval. In fact, although many heterogeneous XML sources have similar content, they may be described using different tag names and structures. This work proposes a series of algorithms for detection of structural and content changes among XML data. The first is an algorithm called XDoI (XML Data Integration Based on Content and Structure Similarity Using Keys) that clusters XML documents into subtrees using leaf-node parents as clustering points. This algorithm matches subtrees using the key concept and compares unmatched subtrees for similarities in both content and structure. The experimental results show that this approach finds much more accurate matches with or without the presence of keys in the subtrees. A second algorithm proposed here is called XDI-CSSK (a system for detecting xml similarity in content and structure using relational database); it eliminates unnecessary clustering points using instance statistics and a taxonomic analyzer. As the number of subtrees to be compared is reduced, the overall execution time is reduced dramatically. Semantic similarity plays a crucial role in precise computational similarity measures. A third algorithm, called XML-SIM (structure and content semantic similarity detection using keys) is based on previous work to detect XML semantic similarity based on structure and content. This algorithm is an improvement over XDI-CSSK and XDoI in that it determines content similarity based on semantic structural similarity. In an experimental evaluation, it outperformed previous approaches in terms of both execution time and false positive rates. Information changes periodically; therefore, it is important to be able to detect changes among different versions of an XML document and use that information to identify semantic similarities. Finally, this work introduces an approach to detect XML similarity and thus to join XML document versions using a change detection mechanism. In this approach, subtree keys still play an important role in order to avoid unnecessary subtree comparisons within multiple versions of the same document. Real data sets from bibliographic domains demonstrate the effectiveness of all these algorithms --Abstract, page iv-v