577 research outputs found
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Workshop Proceedings of the 12th edition of the KONVENS conference
The 2014 issue of KONVENS is even more a forum for exchange: its main topic is the interaction between Computational Linguistics and Information Science, and the synergies such interaction, cooperation and integrated views can produce. This topic at the crossroads of different research traditions which deal with natural language as a container of knowledge, and with methods to extract and manage knowledge that is linguistically represented is close to the heart of many researchers at the Institut für Informationswissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie of Universität Hildesheim: it has long been one of the institute’s research topics, and it has received even more attention over the last few years
Computational acquisition of knowledge in small-data environments: a case study in the field of energetics
The UK’s defence industry is accelerating its implementation of artificial intelligence, including
expert systems and natural language processing (NLP) tools designed to supplement human
analysis. This thesis examines the limitations of NLP tools in small-data environments (common
in defence) in the defence-related energetic-materials domain. A literature review identifies
the domain-specific challenges of developing an expert system (specifically an ontology). The
absence of domain resources such as labelled datasets and, most significantly, the preprocessing
of text resources are identified as challenges. To address the latter, a novel general-purpose
preprocessing pipeline specifically tailored for the energetic-materials domain is developed. The
effectiveness of the pipeline is evaluated.
Examination of the interface between using NLP tools in data-limited environments to either
supplement or replace human analysis completely is conducted in a study examining the subjective
concept of importance. A methodology for directly comparing the ability of NLP tools
and experts to identify important points in the text is presented. Results show the participants
of the study exhibit little agreement, even on which points in the text are important. The NLP,
expert (author of the text being examined) and participants only agree on general statements.
However, as a group, the participants agreed with the expert. In data-limited environments,
the extractive-summarisation tools examined cannot effectively identify the important points
in a technical document akin to an expert.
A methodology for the classification of journal articles by the technology readiness level (TRL)
of the described technologies in a data-limited environment is proposed. Techniques to overcome
challenges with using real-world data such as class imbalances are investigated. A methodology
to evaluate the reliability of human annotations is presented. Analysis identifies a lack of
agreement and consistency in the expert evaluation of document TRL.Open Acces
Embedding Based Link Prediction for Knowledge Graph Completion
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are the most widely used representation of structured information about a particular domain consisting of billions of facts in the form of entities (nodes) and relations (edges) between them. Besides, the KGs also encapsulate the semantic type information of the entities. The last two decades have witnessed a constant growth of KGs in various domains such as government, scholarly data, biomedical domains, etc. KGs have been used in Machine Learning based applications such as entity linking, question answering, recommender systems, etc. Open KGs are mostly heuristically created, automatically generated from heterogeneous resources such as text, images, etc., or are human-curated. However, these KGs are often incomplete, i.e., there are missing links between the entities and missing links between the entities and their corresponding entity types. This thesis focuses on addressing these two challenges of link prediction for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC):
\textbf{(i)} General Link Prediction in KGs that include head and tail prediction, triple classification, and
\textbf{(ii)} Entity Type Prediction.
Most of the graph mining algorithms are proven to be of high complexity, deterring their usage in KG-based applications. In recent years, KG embeddings have been trained to represent the entities and relations in the KG in a low-dimensional vector space preserving the graph structure. In most published works such as the translational models, convolutional models, semantic matching, etc., the triple information is used to generate the latent representation of the entities and relations.
In this dissertation, it is argued that contextual information about the entities obtained from the random walks, and textual entity descriptions, are the keys to improving the latent representation of the entities for KGC. The experimental results show that the knowledge obtained from the context of the entities supports the hypothesis. Several methods have been proposed for KGC and their effectiveness is shown empirically in this thesis. Firstly, a novel multi-hop attentive KG embedding model MADLINK is proposed for Link Prediction. It considers the contextual information of the entities by using random walks as well as textual entity descriptions of the entities. Secondly, a novel architecture exploiting the information contained in a pre-trained contextual Neural Language Model (NLM) is proposed for Triple Classification. Thirdly, the limitations of the current state-of-the-art (SoTA) entity type prediction models have been analysed and a novel entity typing model CAT2Type is proposed that exploits the Wikipedia Categories which is one of the most under-treated features of the KGs. This model can also be used to predict missing types of unseen entities i.e., the newly added entities in the KG.
Finally, another novel architecture GRAND is proposed to predict the missing entity types in KGs using multi-label, multi-class, and hierarchical classification by leveraging different strategic graph walks in the KGs. The extensive experiments and ablation studies show that all the proposed models outperform the current SoTA models and set new baselines for KGC.
The proposed models establish that the NLMs and the contextual information of the entities in the KGs together with the different neural network architectures benefit KGC. The promising results and observations open up interesting scopes for future research involving exploiting the proposed models in domain-specific KGs such as scholarly data, biomedical data, etc. Furthermore, the link prediction model can be exploited as a base model for the entity alignment task as it considers the neighbourhood information of the entities
Representation Learning for Texts and Graphs: A Unified Perspective on Efficiency, Multimodality, and Adaptability
[...] This thesis is situated between natural language processing and graph representation learning and investigates selected connections. First, we introduce matrix embeddings as an efficient text representation sensitive to word order. [...] Experiments with ten linguistic probing tasks, 11 supervised, and five unsupervised downstream tasks reveal that vector and matrix embeddings have complementary strengths and that a jointly trained hybrid model outperforms both. Second, a popular pretrained language model, BERT, is distilled into matrix embeddings. [...] The results on the GLUE benchmark show that these models are competitive with other recent contextualized language models while being more efficient in time and space. Third, we compare three model types for text classification: bag-of-words, sequence-, and graph-based models. Experiments on five datasets show that, surprisingly, a wide multilayer perceptron on top of a bag-of-words representation is competitive with recent graph-based approaches, questioning the necessity of graphs synthesized from the text. [...] Fourth, we investigate the connection between text and graph data in document-based recommender systems for citations and subject labels. Experiments on six datasets show that the title as side information improves the performance of autoencoder models. [...] We find that the meaning of item co-occurrence is crucial for the choice of input modalities and an appropriate model. Fifth, we introduce a generic framework for lifelong learning on evolving graphs in which new nodes, edges, and classes appear over time. [...] The results show that by reusing previous parameters in incremental training, it is possible to employ smaller history sizes with only a slight decrease in accuracy compared to training with complete history. Moreover, weighting the binary cross-entropy loss function is crucial to mitigate the problem of class imbalance when detecting newly emerging classes. [...
Neural Techniques for German Dependency Parsing
Syntactic parsing is the task of analyzing the structure of a sentence based on some predefined formal assumption. It is a key component in many natural language processing (NLP) pipelines and is of great benefit for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks such as information retrieval or sentiment analysis. Despite achieving very high results with neural network techniques, most syntactic parsing research pays attention to only a few prominent languages (such as English or Chinese) or language-agnostic settings. Thus, we still lack studies that focus on just one language and design specific parsing strategies for that language with regards to its linguistic properties.
In this thesis, we take German as the language of interest and develop more accurate methods for German dependency parsing by combining state-of-the-art neural network methods with techniques that address the specific challenges posed by the language-specific properties of German. Compared to English, German has richer morphology, semi-free word order, and case syncretism. It is the combination of those characteristics that makes parsing German an interesting and challenging task.
Because syntactic parsing is a task that requires many levels of language understanding, we propose to study and improve the knowledge of parsing models at each level in order to improve syntactic parsing for German. These levels are: (sub)word level, syntactic level, semantic level, and sentence level.
At the (sub)word level, we look into a surge in out-of-vocabulary words in German data caused by compounding. We propose a new type of embeddings for compounds that is a compositional model of the embeddings of individual components. Our experiments show that character-based embeddings are superior to word and compound embeddings in dependency parsing, and compound embeddings only outperform word embeddings when the part-of-speech (POS) information is unavailable. Thus, we conclude that it is the morpho-syntactic information of unknown compounds, not the semantic one, that is crucial for parsing German.
At the syntax level, we investigate challenges for local grammatical function labeler that are caused by case syncretism. In detail, we augment the grammatical function labeling component in a neural dependency parser that labels each head-dependent pair independently with a new labeler that includes a decision history, using Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs). All our proposed models significantly outperformed the baseline on three languages: English, German and Czech. However, the impact of the new models is not the same for all languages: the improvement for English is smaller than for the non-configurational languages (German and Czech). Our analysis suggests that the success of the history-based models is not due to better handling of long dependencies but that they are better in dealing with the uncertainty in head direction.
We study the interaction of syntactic parsing with the semantic level via the problem of PP attachment disambiguation. Our motivation is to provide a realistic evaluation of the task where gold information is not available and compare the results of disambiguation systems against the output of a strong neural parser. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that PP attachment disambiguation is evaluated and compared against neural dependency parsing on predicted information. In addition, we present a novel approach for PP attachment disambiguation that uses biaffine attention and utilizes pre-trained contextualized word embeddings as semantic knowledge. Our end-to-end system outperformed the previous pipeline approach on German by a large margin simply by avoiding error propagation caused by predicted information. In the end, we show that parsing systems (with the same semantic knowledge) are in general superior to systems specialized for PP attachment disambiguation.
Lastly, we improve dependency parsing at the sentence level using reranking techniques. So far, previous work on neural reranking has been evaluated on English and Chinese only, both languages with a configurational word order and poor morphology. We re-assess the potential of successful neural reranking models from the literature on English and on two morphologically rich(er) languages, German and Czech. In addition, we introduce a new variation of a discriminative reranker based on graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Our proposed reranker not only outperforms previous models on English but is the only model that is able to improve results over the baselines on German and Czech. Our analysis points out that the failure is due to the lower quality of the k-best lists, where the gold tree ratio and the diversity of the list play an important role
A distributional investigation of German verbs
Diese Dissertation bietet eine empirische Untersuchung deutscher Verben auf der Grundlage statistischer Beschreibungen, die aus einem großen deutschen Textkorpus gewonnen wurden. In einem kurzen Überblick über linguistische Theorien zur lexikalischen Semantik von Verben skizziere ich die Idee, dass die Verbbedeutung wesentlich von seiner Argumentstruktur (der Anzahl und Art der Argumente, die zusammen mit dem Verb auftreten) und seiner Aspektstruktur (Eigenschaften, die den zeitlichen Ablauf des vom Verb denotierten Ereignisses bestimmen) abhängt. Anschließend erstelle ich statistische Beschreibungen von Verben, die auf diesen beiden unterschiedlichen Bedeutungsfacetten basieren. Insbesondere untersuche ich verbale Subkategorisierung, Selektionspräferenzen und Aspekt. Alle diese Modellierungsstrategien werden anhand einer gemeinsamen Aufgabe, der Verbklassifikation, bewertet. Ich zeige, dass im Rahmen von maschinellem Lernen erworbene Merkmale, die verbale lexikalische Aspekte erfassen, für eine Anwendung von Vorteil sind, die Argumentstrukturen betrifft, nämlich semantische Rollenkennzeichnung. Darüber hinaus zeige ich, dass Merkmale, die die verbale Argumentstruktur erfassen, bei der Aufgabe, ein Verb nach seiner Aspektklasse zu klassifizieren, gut funktionieren. Diese Ergebnisse bestätigen, dass diese beiden Facetten der Verbbedeutung auf grundsätzliche Weise zusammenhängen.This dissertation provides an empirical investigation of German verbs conducted on the basis of statistical descriptions acquired from a large corpus of German text. In a brief overview of the linguistic theory pertaining to the lexical semantics of verbs, I outline the idea that verb meaning is composed of argument structure (the number and types of arguments that co-occur with a verb) and aspectual structure (properties describing the temporal progression of an event referenced by the verb). I then produce statistical descriptions of verbs according to these two distinct facets of meaning: In particular, I examine verbal subcategorisation, selectional preferences, and aspectual type. All three of these modelling strategies are evaluated on a common task, automatic verb classification. I demonstrate that automatically acquired features capturing verbal lexical aspect are beneficial for an application that concerns argument structure, namely semantic role labelling. Furthermore, I demonstrate that features capturing verbal argument structure perform well on the task of classifying a verb for its aspectual type. These findings suggest that these two facets of verb meaning are related in an underlying way
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