Using ontology in query answering systems: Scenarios, requirements and challenges

Equipped with the ultimate query answering system, computers would finally be in a position to address all our information needs in a natural way. In this paper, we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is working towards the ultimate Question Answering (QA) System for healthcare workers. L&C’s company strategy in this area is to design in a step-by-step fashion the essential components of such a system, each component being designed to solve some one part of the total problem and at the same time reflect well-defined needs on the prat of our customers. We compare our strategy with the research roadmap proposed by the Question Answering Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), paying special attention to the role of ontology

Gender in Engineering Departments: Are There Gender Differences in Interruptions of Academic Job Talks?

We use a case study of job talks in five engineering departments to analyze the under-studied area of gendered barriers to finalists for faculty positions. We focus on one segment of the interview day of short-listed candidates invited to campus: the “job talk”, when candidates present their original research to the academic department. We analyze video recordings of 119 job talks across five engineering departments at two Research 1 universities. Specifically, we analyze whether there are differences by gender or by years of post-Ph.D. experience in the number of interruptions, follow-up questions, and total questions that job candidates receive. We find that, compared to men, women receive more follow-up questions and more total questions. Moreover, a higher proportion of women’s talk time is taken up by the audience asking questions. Further, the number of questions is correlated with the job candidate’s statements and actions that reveal he or she is rushing to present their slides and complete the talk. We argue that women candidates face more interruptions and often have less time to bring their talk to a compelling conclusion, which is connected to the phenomenon of “stricter standards” of competence demanded by evaluators of short-listed women applying for a masculine-typed job. We conclude with policy recommendations

Arabic open information extraction system using dependency parsing

Arabic is a Semitic language and one of the most natural languages distinguished by the richness in morphological enunciation and derivation. This special and complex nature makes extracting information from the Arabic language difficult and always needs improvement. Open information extraction systems (OIE) have been emerged and used in different languages, especially in English. However, it has almost not been used for the Arabic language. Accordingly, this paper aims to introduce an OIE system that extracts the relation tuple from Arabic web text, exploiting Arabic dependency parsing and thinking carefully about all possible text relations. Based on clause types' propositions as extractable relations and constituents' grammatical functions, the identities of corresponding clause types are established. The proposed system named Arabic open information extraction(AOIE) can extract highly scalable Arabic text relations while being domain independent. Implementing the proposed system handles the problem using supervised strategies while the system relies on unsupervised extraction strategies. Also, the system has been implemented in several domains to avoid information extraction in a specific field. The results prove that the system achieves high efficiency in extracting clauses from large amounts of text

The building and application of a semantic platform for an e-research society

This thesis reviews the area of e-Research (the use of electronic infrastructure to support research) and considers how the insight gained from the development of social networking sites in the early 21st century might assist researchers in using this infrastructure. In particular it examines the myExperiment project, a website for e-Research that allows users to upload, share and annotate work flows and associated files, using a social networking framework. This Virtual Organisation (VO) supports many of the attributes required to allow a community of users to come together to build an e-Research society. The main focus of the thesis is how the emerging society that is developing out of my-Experiment could use Semantic Web technologies to provide users with a significantly richer representation of their research and research processes to better support reproducible research. One of the initial major contributions was building an ontology for myExperiment. Through this it became possible to build an API for generating and delivering this richer representation and an interface for querying it. Having this richer representation it has been possible to follow Linked Data principles to link up with other projects that have this type of representation. Doing this has allowed additional data to be provided to the user and has begun to set in context the data produced by myExperiment. The way that the myExperiment project has gone about this task and consideration of how changes may affect existing users, is another major contribution of this thesis. Adding a semantic representation to an emergent e-Research society like myExperiment,has given it the potential to provide additional applications. In particular the capability to support Research Objects, an encapsulation of a scientist's research or research process to support reproducibility. The insight gained by adding a semantic representation to myExperiment, has allowed this thesis to contribute towards the design of the architecture for these Research Objects that use similar Semantic Web technologies. The myExperiment ontology has been designed such that it can be aligned with other ontologies. Scientific Discourse, the collaborative argumentation of different claims and hypotheses, with the support of evidence from experiments, to construct, confirm or disprove theories requires the capability to represent experiments carried out in silico. This thesis discusses how, as part of the HCLS Scientific Discourse subtask group, the myExperiment ontology has begun to be aligned with other scientific discourse ontologies to provide this capability. It also compares this alignment of ontologies with the architecture for Research Objects. This thesis has also examines how myExperiment's Linked Data and that of other projects can be used in the design of novel interfaces. As a theoretical exercise, it considers how this Linked Data might be used to support a Question-Answering system, that would allow users to query myExperiment's data in a more efficient and user-friendly way. It concludes by reviewing all the steps undertaken to provide a semantic platform for an emergent e-Research society to facilitate the sharing of research and its processes to support reproducible research. It assesses their contribution to enhancing the features provided by myExperiment, as well as e-Research as a whole. It considers how the contributions provided by this thesis could be extended to produce additional tools that will allow researchers to make greater use of the rich data that is now available, in a way that enhances their research process rather than significantly changing it or adding extra workload