Representation Learning for Words and Entities

This thesis presents new methods for unsupervised learning of distributed representations of words and entities from text and knowledge bases. The first algorithm presented in the thesis is a multi-view algorithm for learning representations of words called Multiview Latent Semantic Analysis (MVLSA). By incorporating up to 46 different types of co-occurrence statistics for the same vocabulary of english words, I show that MVLSA outperforms other state-of-the-art word embedding models. Next, I focus on learning entity representations for search and recommendation and present the second method of this thesis, Neural Variational Set Expansion (NVSE). NVSE is also an unsupervised learning method, but it is based on the Variational Autoencoder framework. Evaluations with human annotators show that NVSE can facilitate better search and recommendation of information gathered from noisy, automatic annotation of unstructured natural language corpora. Finally, I move from unstructured data and focus on structured knowledge graphs. I present novel approaches for learning embeddings of vertices and edges in a knowledge graph that obey logical constraints.Comment: phd thesis, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Representation Learning, Knowledge Graphs, Entities, Word Embeddings, Entity Embedding

Automatic Structured Text Summarization with Concept Maps

Efficiently exploring a collection of text documents in order to answer a complex question is a challenge that many people face. As abundant information on almost any topic is electronically available nowadays, supporting tools are needed to ensure that people can profit from the information's availability rather than suffer from the information overload. Structured summaries can help in this situation: They can be used to provide a concise overview of the contents of a document collection, they can reveal interesting relationships and they can be used as a navigation structure to further explore the documents. A concept map, which is a graph representing concepts and their relationships, is a specific form of a structured summary that offers these benefits. However, despite its appealing properties, only a limited amount of research has studied how concept maps can be automatically created to summarize documents. Automating that task is challenging and requires a variety of text processing techniques including information extraction, coreference resolution and summarization. The goal of this thesis is to better understand these challenges and to develop computational models that can address them. As a first contribution, this thesis lays the necessary ground for comparable research on computational models for concept map--based summarization. We propose a precise definition of the task together with suitable evaluation protocols and carry out experimental comparisons of previously proposed methods. As a result, we point out limitations of existing methods and gaps that have to be closed to successfully create summary concept maps. Towards that end, we also release a new benchmark corpus for the task that has been created with a novel, scalable crowdsourcing strategy. Furthermore, we propose new techniques for several subtasks of creating summary concept maps. First, we introduce the usage of predicate-argument analysis for the extraction of concept and relation mentions, which greatly simplifies the development of extraction methods. Second, we demonstrate that a predicate-argument analysis tool can be ported from English to German with low effort, indicating that the extraction technique can also be applied to other languages. We further propose to group concept mentions using pairwise classifications and set partitioning, which significantly improves the quality of the created summary concept maps. We show similar improvements for a new supervised importance estimation model and an optimal subgraph selection procedure. By combining these techniques in a pipeline, we establish a new state-of-the-art for the summarization task. Additionally, we study the use of neural networks to model the summarization problem as a single end-to-end task. While such approaches are not yet competitive with pipeline-based approaches, we report several experiments that illustrate the challenges - mostly related to training data - that currently limit the performance of this technique. We conclude the thesis by presenting a prototype system that demonstrates the use of automatically generated summary concept maps in practice and by pointing out promising directions for future research on the topic of this thesis

Extracting and Representing Entities, Types, and Relations

Making complex decisions in areas like science, government policy, finance, and clinical treatments all require integrating and reasoning over disparate data sources. While some decisions can be made from a single source of information, others require considering multiple pieces of evidence and how they relate to one another. Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide a natural approach for addressing this type of problem: they can serve as long-term stores of abstracted knowledge organized around concepts and their relationships, and can be populated from heterogeneous sources including databases and text. KGs can facilitate higher level reasoning, influence the interpretation of new data, and serve as a scaffolding for knowledge that enhances the acquisition of new information. A symbolic graph over a fixed, human-defined schema encoding facts about entities and their relations is the predominant method for representing knowledge, but this approach is brittle, lacks specificity, and is inevitably highly incomplete. On the other extreme, recent work on purely text-based knowledge models lack abstractions necessary for complex reasoning. In this thesis I will present work incorporating neural models, rich structured ontologies, and unstructured raw text for representing knowledge. I will first discuss my work enhancing universal schema, a method for learning a latent schema over both existing structured resources and unstructured free text, embedding them jointly within a shared semantic space. Next, I inject additional hierarchical structure into the embedding space of concepts, resulting in more efficient statistical sharing among related concepts and improved accuracy in both fine-grained entity typing and linking. I then present initial work representing knowledge in context, including a single model for extracting all entities and long-range relations simultaneously over full paragraphs while jointly linking these entities to a KG. I will conclude by discussing possible future directions for representing knowledge in context

Representation Learning for Words and Entities

This thesis presents new methods for unsupervised learning of distributed representations of words and entities from text and knowledge bases. The first algorithm presented in the thesis is a multi-view algorithm for learning representations of words called Multiview LSA (MVLSA). Through experiments on close to 50 different views, I show that MVLSA outperforms other state-of-the-art word embedding models. After that, I focus on learning entity representations for search and recommendation and present the second algorithm of this thesis called Neural Variational Set Expansion (NVSE). NVSE is also an unsupervised learning method, but it is based on the Variational Autoencoder framework. Evaluations with human annotators show that NVSE can facilitate better search and recommendation of information gathered from noisy, automatic annotation of unstructured natural language corpora. Finally, I move from unstructured data and focus on structured knowledge graphs. Moreover, I present novel approaches for learning embeddings of vertices and edges in a knowledge graph that obey logical constraints

Advances in knowledge discovery and data mining Part II

19th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2015, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, May 19-22, 2015, Proceedings, Part II</p

Proceedings of the Eighth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CliC-it 2021

The eighth edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2021) was held at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca from 26th to 28th January 2022. After the edition of 2020, which was held in fully virtual mode due to the health emergency related to Covid-19, CLiC-it 2021 represented the first moment for the Italian research community of Computational Linguistics to meet in person after more than one year of full/partial lockdown

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

Tune your brown clustering, please

Brown clustering, an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique based on ngram mutual information, has proven useful in many NLP applications. However, most uses of Brown clustering employ the same default configuration; the appropriateness of this configuration has gone predominantly unexplored. Accordingly, we present information for practitioners on the behaviour of Brown clustering in order to assist hyper-parametre tuning, in the form of a theoretical model of Brown clustering utility. This model is then evaluated empirically in two sequence labelling tasks over two text types. We explore the dynamic between the input corpus size, chosen number of classes, and quality of the resulting clusters, which has an impact for any approach using Brown clustering. In every scenario that we examine, our results reveal that the values most commonly used for the clustering are sub-optimal