13,945 research outputs found
A Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English
Our goal is to use formal methods to analyse normative documents written in
English, such as privacy policies and service-level agreements. This requires
the combination of a number of different elements, including information
extraction from natural language, formal languages for model representation,
and an interface for property specification and verification. We have worked on
a collection of components for this task: a natural language extraction tool, a
suitable formalism for representing such documents, an interface for building
models in this formalism, and methods for answering queries asked of a given
model. In this work, each of these concerns is brought together in a web-based
tool, providing a single interface for analysing normative texts in English.
Through the use of a running example, we describe each component and
demonstrate the workflow established by our tool
Foreground and background text in retrieval
Our hypothesis is that certain clauses have foreground functions in text,
while other clauses have background functions and that these functions are
expressed or reflected in the syntactic structure of the clause.
Presumably these clauses will have differing utility for automatic
approaches to text understanding; a summarization system might want to
utilize background clauses to capture commonalities between numbers of
documents while an indexing system might use foreground clauses in order to
capture specific characteristics of a certain document
PowerAqua: fishing the semantic web
The Semantic Web (SW) offers an opportunity to develop novel, sophisticated forms of question answering (QA). Specifically, the availability of distributed semantic markup on a large scale opens the way to QA systems which can make use of such semantic information to provide precise, formally derived answers to questions. At the same time the distributed, heterogeneous, large-scale nature of the semantic information introduces significant challenges. In this paper we describe the design of a QA system, PowerAqua, designed to exploit semantic markup on the web to provide answers to questions posed in natural language. PowerAqua does not assume that the user has any prior information about the semantic resources. The system takes as input a natural language query, translates it into a set of logical queries, which are then answered by consulting and aggregating information derived from multiple heterogeneous semantic sources
Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid
The bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery
ANNIS: a linguistic database for exploring information structure
In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" (ANNotation of Information Structure). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing
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