Tackling scalability issues in mining path patterns from knowledge graphs: a preliminary study

Features mined from knowledge graphs are widely used within multiple knowledge discovery tasks such as classification or fact-checking. Here, we consider a given set of vertices, called seed vertices, and focus on mining their associated neighboring vertices, paths, and, more generally, path patterns that involve classes of ontologies linked with knowledge graphs. Due to the combinatorial nature and the increasing size of real-world knowledge graphs, the task of mining these patterns immediately entails scalability issues. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a pattern mining approach that relies on a set of constraints (e.g., support or degree thresholds) and the monotonicity property. As our motivation comes from the mining of real-world knowledge graphs, we illustrate our approach with PGxLOD, a biomedical knowledge graph

Explainable methods for knowledge graph refinement and exploration via symbolic reasoning

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have applications in many domains such as Finance, Manufacturing, and Healthcare. While recent efforts have created large KGs, their content is far from complete and sometimes includes invalid statements. Therefore, it is crucial to refine the constructed KGs to enhance their coverage and accuracy via KG completion and KG validation. It is also vital to provide human-comprehensible explanations for such refinements, so that humans have trust in the KG quality. Enabling KG exploration, by search and browsing, is also essential for users to understand the KG value and limitations towards down-stream applications. However, the large size of KGs makes KG exploration very challenging. While the type taxonomy of KGs is a useful asset along these lines, it remains insufficient for deep exploration. In this dissertation we tackle the aforementioned challenges of KG refinement and KG exploration by combining logical reasoning over the KG with other techniques such as KG embedding models and text mining. Through such combination, we introduce methods that provide human-understandable output. Concretely, we introduce methods to tackle KG incompleteness by learning exception-aware rules over the existing KG. Learned rules are then used in inferring missing links in the KG accurately. Furthermore, we propose a framework for constructing human-comprehensible explanations for candidate facts from both KG and text. Extracted explanations are used to insure the validity of KG facts. Finally, to facilitate KG exploration, we introduce a method that combines KG embeddings with rule mining to compute informative entity clusters with explanations.Wissensgraphen haben viele Anwendungen in verschiedenen Bereichen, beispielsweise im Finanz- und Gesundheitswesen. Wissensgraphen sind jedoch unvollständig und enthalten auch ungültige Daten. Hohe Abdeckung und Korrektheit erfordern neue Methoden zur Wissensgraph-Erweiterung und Wissensgraph-Validierung. Beide Aufgaben zusammen werden als Wissensgraph-Verfeinerung bezeichnet. Ein wichtiger Aspekt dabei ist die Erklärbarkeit und Verständlichkeit von Wissensgraphinhalten für Nutzer. In Anwendungen ist darüber hinaus die nutzerseitige Exploration von Wissensgraphen von besonderer Bedeutung. Suchen und Navigieren im Graph hilft dem Anwender, die Wissensinhalte und ihre Limitationen besser zu verstehen. Aufgrund der riesigen Menge an vorhandenen Entitäten und Fakten ist die Wissensgraphen-Exploration eine Herausforderung. Taxonomische Typsystem helfen dabei, sind jedoch für tiefergehende Exploration nicht ausreichend. Diese Dissertation adressiert die Herausforderungen der Wissensgraph-Verfeinerung und der Wissensgraph-Exploration durch algorithmische Inferenz über dem Wissensgraph. Sie erweitert logisches Schlussfolgern und kombiniert es mit anderen Methoden, insbesondere mit neuronalen Wissensgraph-Einbettungen und mit Text-Mining. Diese neuen Methoden liefern Ausgaben mit Erklärungen für Nutzer. Die Dissertation umfasst folgende Beiträge: Insbesondere leistet die Dissertation folgende Beiträge: • Zur Wissensgraph-Erweiterung präsentieren wir ExRuL, eine Methode zur Revision von Horn-Regeln durch Hinzufügen von Ausnahmebedingungen zum Rumpf der Regeln. Die erweiterten Regeln können neue Fakten inferieren und somit Lücken im Wissensgraphen schließen. Experimente mit großen Wissensgraphen zeigen, dass diese Methode Fehler in abgeleiteten Fakten erheblich reduziert und nutzerfreundliche Erklärungen liefert. • Mit RuLES stellen wir eine Methode zum Lernen von Regeln vor, die auf probabilistischen Repräsentationen für fehlende Fakten basiert. Das Verfahren erweitert iterativ die aus einem Wissensgraphen induzierten Regeln, indem es neuronale Wissensgraph-Einbettungen mit Informationen aus Textkorpora kombiniert. Bei der Regelgenerierung werden neue Metriken für die Regelqualität verwendet. Experimente zeigen, dass RuLES die Qualität der gelernten Regeln und ihrer Vorhersagen erheblich verbessert. • Zur Unterstützung der Wissensgraph-Validierung wird ExFaKT vorgestellt, ein Framework zur Konstruktion von Erklärungen für Faktkandidaten. Die Methode transformiert Kandidaten mit Hilfe von Regeln in eine Menge von Aussagen, die leichter zu finden und zu validieren oder widerlegen sind. Die Ausgabe von ExFaKT ist eine Menge semantischer Evidenzen für Faktkandidaten, die aus Textkorpora und dem Wissensgraph extrahiert werden. Experimente zeigen, dass die Transformationen die Ausbeute und Qualität der entdeckten Erklärungen deutlich verbessert. Die generierten unterstützen Erklärungen unterstütze sowohl die manuelle Wissensgraph- Validierung durch Kuratoren als auch die automatische Validierung. • Zur Unterstützung der Wissensgraph-Exploration wird ExCut vorgestellt, eine Methode zur Erzeugung von informativen Entitäts-Clustern mit Erklärungen unter Verwendung von Wissensgraph-Einbettungen und automatisch induzierten Regeln. Eine Cluster-Erklärung besteht aus einer Kombination von Relationen zwischen den Entitäten, die den Cluster identifizieren. ExCut verbessert gleichzeitig die Cluster- Qualität und die Cluster-Erklärbarkeit durch iteratives Verschränken des Lernens von Einbettungen und Regeln. Experimente zeigen, dass ExCut Cluster von hoher Qualität berechnet und dass die Cluster-Erklärungen für Nutzer informativ sind

Analyzing Granger causality in climate data with time series classification methods

Attribution studies in climate science aim for scientifically ascertaining the influence of climatic variations on natural or anthropogenic factors. Many of those studies adopt the concept of Granger causality to infer statistical cause-effect relationships, while utilizing traditional autoregressive models. In this article, we investigate the potential of state-of-the-art time series classification techniques to enhance causal inference in climate science. We conduct a comparative experimental study of different types of algorithms on a large test suite that comprises a unique collection of datasets from the area of climate-vegetation dynamics. The results indicate that specialized time series classification methods are able to improve existing inference procedures. Substantial differences are observed among the methods that were tested

Exploiting semantic web knowledge graphs in data mining

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is a research field concerned with deriving higher-level insights from data. The tasks performed in that field are knowledge intensive and can often benefit from using additional knowledge from various sources. Therefore, many approaches have been proposed in this area that combine Semantic Web data with the data mining and knowledge discovery process. Semantic Web knowledge graphs are a backbone of many information systems that require access to structured knowledge. Such knowledge graphs contain factual knowledge about real word entities and the relations between them, which can be utilized in various natural language processing, information retrieval, and any data mining applications. Following the principles of the Semantic Web, Semantic Web knowledge graphs are publicly available as Linked Open Data. Linked Open Data is an open, interlinked collection of datasets in machine-interpretable form, covering most of the real world domains. In this thesis, we investigate the hypothesis if Semantic Web knowledge graphs can be exploited as background knowledge in different steps of the knowledge discovery process, and different data mining tasks. More precisely, we aim to show that Semantic Web knowledge graphs can be utilized for generating valuable data mining features that can be used in various data mining tasks. Identifying, collecting and integrating useful background knowledge for a given data mining application can be a tedious and time consuming task. Furthermore, most data mining tools require features in propositional form, i.e., binary, nominal or numerical features associated with an instance, while Linked Open Data sources are usually graphs by nature. Therefore, in Part I, we evaluate unsupervised feature generation strategies from types and relations in knowledge graphs, which are used in different data mining tasks, i.e., classification, regression, and outlier detection. As the number of generated features grows rapidly with the number of instances in the dataset, we provide a strategy for feature selection in hierarchical feature space, in order to select only the most informative and most representative features for a given dataset. Furthermore, we provide an end-to-end tool for mining the Web of Linked Data, which provides functionalities for each step of the knowledge discovery process, i.e., linking local data to a Semantic Web knowledge graph, integrating features from multiple knowledge graphs, feature generation and selection, and building machine learning models. However, we show that such feature generation strategies often lead to high dimensional feature vectors even after dimensionality reduction, and also, the reusability of such feature vectors across different datasets is limited. In Part II, we propose an approach that circumvents the shortcomings introduced with the approaches in Part I. More precisely, we develop an approach that is able to embed complete Semantic Web knowledge graphs in a low dimensional feature space, where each entity and relation in the knowledge graph is represented as a numerical vector. Projecting such latent representations of entities into a lower dimensional feature space shows that semantically similar entities appear closer to each other. We use several Semantic Web knowledge graphs to show that such latent representation of entities have high relevance for different data mining tasks. Furthermore, we show that such features can be easily reused for different datasets and different tasks. In Part III, we describe a list of applications that exploit Semantic Web knowledge graphs, besides the standard data mining tasks, like classification and regression. We show that the approaches developed in Part I and Part II can be used in applications in various domains. More precisely, we show that Semantic Web graphs can be exploited for analyzing statistics, building recommender systems, entity and document modeling, and taxonomy induction. %In Part III, we focus on semantic annotations in HTML pages, which are another realization of the Semantic Web vision. Semantic annotations are integrated into the code of HTML pages using markup languages, like Microformats, RDFa, and Microdata. While such data covers various domains and topics, and can be useful for developing various data mining applications, additional steps of cleaning and integrating the data need to be performed. In this thesis, we describe a set of approaches for processing long literals and images extracted from semantic annotations in HTML pages. We showcase the approaches in the e-commerce domain. Such approaches contribute in building and consuming Semantic Web knowledge graphs

Short Text Categorization using World Knowledge

The content of the World Wide Web is drastically multiplying, and thus the amount of available online text data is increasing every day. Today, many users contribute to this massive global network via online platforms by sharing information in the form of a short text. Such an immense amount of data covers subjects from all the existing domains (e.g., Sports, Economy, Biology, etc.). Further, manually processing such data is beyond human capabilities. As a result, Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, which aim to automatically analyze and process natural language documents have gained significant attention. Among these tasks, due to its application in various domains, text categorization has become one of the most fundamental and crucial tasks. However, the standard text categorization models face major challenges while performing short text categorization, due to the unique characteristics of short texts, i.e., insufficient text length, sparsity, ambiguity, etc. In other words, the conventional approaches provide substandard performance, when they are directly applied to the short text categorization task. Furthermore, in the case of short text, the standard feature extraction techniques such as bag-of-words suffer from limited contextual information. Hence, it is essential to enhance the text representations with an external knowledge source. Moreover, the traditional models require a significant amount of manually labeled data and obtaining labeled data is a costly and time-consuming task. Therefore, although recently proposed supervised methods, especially, deep neural network approaches have demonstrated notable performance, the requirement of the labeled data remains the main bottleneck of these approaches. In this thesis, we investigate the main research question of how to perform \textit{short text categorization} effectively \textit{without requiring any labeled data} using knowledge bases as an external source. In this regard, novel short text categorization models, namely, Knowledge-Based Short Text Categorization (KBSTC) and Weakly Supervised Short Text Categorization using World Knowledge (WESSTEC) have been introduced and evaluated in this thesis. The models do not require any hand-labeled data to perform short text categorization, instead, they leverage the semantic similarity between the short texts and the predefined categories. To quantify such semantic similarity, the low dimensional representation of entities and categories have been learned by exploiting a large knowledge base. To achieve that a novel entity and category embedding model has also been proposed in this thesis. The extensive experiments have been conducted to assess the performance of the proposed short text categorization models and the embedding model on several standard benchmark datasets

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop "What can FCA do for Artificial Intelligence?", FCA4AI 2016(co-located with ECAI 2016, The Hague, Netherlands, August 30th 2016)

International audienceThese are the proceedings of the fifth edition of the FCA4AI workshop (http://www.fca4ai.hse.ru/). Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a mathematically well-founded theory aimed at data analysis and classification that can be used for many purposes, especially for Artificial Intelligence (AI) needs. The objective of the FCA4AI workshop is to investigate two main main issues: how can FCA support various AI activities (knowledge discovery, knowledge representation and reasoning, learning, data mining, NLP, information retrieval), and how can FCA be extended in order to help AI researchers to solve new and complex problems in their domain. Accordingly, topics of interest are related to the following: (i) Extensions of FCA for AI: pattern structures, projections, abstractions. (ii) Knowledge discovery based on FCA: classification, data mining, pattern mining, functional dependencies, biclustering, stability, visualization. (iii) Knowledge processing based on concept lattices: modeling, representation, reasoning. (iv) Application domains: natural language processing, information retrieval, recommendation, mining of web of data and of social networks, etc

Exploiting general-purpose background knowledge for automated schema matching

The schema matching task is an integral part of the data integration process. It is usually the first step in integrating data. Schema matching is typically very complex and time-consuming. It is, therefore, to the largest part, carried out by humans. One reason for the low amount of automation is the fact that schemas are often defined with deep background knowledge that is not itself present within the schemas. Overcoming the problem of missing background knowledge is a core challenge in automating the data integration process. In this dissertation, the task of matching semantic models, so-called ontologies, with the help of external background knowledge is investigated in-depth in Part I. Throughout this thesis, the focus lies on large, general-purpose resources since domain-specific resources are rarely available for most domains. Besides new knowledge resources, this thesis also explores new strategies to exploit such resources. A technical base for the development and comparison of matching systems is presented in Part II. The framework introduced here allows for simple and modularized matcher development (with background knowledge sources) and for extensive evaluations of matching systems. One of the largest structured sources for general-purpose background knowledge are knowledge graphs which have grown significantly in size in recent years. However, exploiting such graphs is not trivial. In Part III, knowledge graph em- beddings are explored, analyzed, and compared. Multiple improvements to existing approaches are presented. In Part IV, numerous concrete matching systems which exploit general-purpose background knowledge are presented. Furthermore, exploitation strategies and resources are analyzed and compared. This dissertation closes with a perspective on real-world applications

Fouille de données de santé

Dans le domaine de la santé, les techniques d’analyse de données sont de plus en plus populaires et se révèlent même indispensables pour gérer les gros volumes de données produits pour un patient et par le patient. Deux thématiques seront abordées dans cette présentation d'HDR.La première porte sur la définition, la formalisation, l’implémentation et la validation de méthodes d’analyse permettant de décrire le contenu de bases de données médicales. Je me suis particulièrement intéressée aux données séquentielles. J’ai fait évoluer la classique notion de motif séquentiel pour y intégrer des composantes contextuelles, spatiales et sur l’ordre partiel des éléments composant les motifs. Ces nouvelles informations enrichissent la sémantique initiale de ces motifs.La seconde thématique se focalise sur l’analyse des productions et des interactions des patients au travers des médias sociaux. J’ai principalement travaillé sur des méthodes permettant d’analyser les productions narratives des patients selon leurs temporalités, leurs thématiques, les sentiments associés ou encore le rôle et la réputation du locuteur s’étant exprimé dans les messages