Toward a relational concept of uncertainty: about knowing too little, knowing too differently, and accepting not to know

Uncertainty of late has become an increasingly important and controversial topic in water resource management, and natural resources management in general. Diverse managing goals, changing environmental conditions, conflicting interests, and lack of predictability are some of the characteristics that decision makers have to face. This has resulted in the application and development of strategies such as adaptive management, which proposes flexibility and capability to adapt to unknown conditions as a way of dealing with uncertainties. However, this shift in ideas about managing has not always been accompanied by a general shift in the way uncertainties are understood and handled. To improve this situation, we believe it is necessary to recontextualize uncertainty in a broader way¿relative to its role, meaning, and relationship with participants in decision making¿because it is from this understanding that problems and solutions emerge. Under this view, solutions do not exclusively consist of eliminating or reducing uncertainty, but of reframing the problems as such so that they convey a different meaning. To this end, we propose a relational approach to uncertainty analysis. Here, we elaborate on this new conceptualization of uncertainty, and indicate some implications of this view for strategies for dealing with uncertainty in water management. We present an example as an illustration of these concepts. Key words: adaptive management; ambiguity; frames; framing; knowledge relationship; multiple knowledge frames; natural resource management; negotiation; participation; social learning; uncertainty; water managemen

Deep Neural Architectures for End-to-End Relation Extraction

The rapid pace of scientific and technological advancements has led to a meteoric growth in knowledge, as evidenced by a sharp increase in the number of scholarly publications in recent years. PubMed, for example, archives more than 30 million biomedical articles across various domains and covers a wide range of topics including medicine, pharmacy, biology, and healthcare. Social media and digital journalism have similarly experienced their own accelerated growth in the age of big data. Hence, there is a compelling need for ways to organize and distill the vast, fragmented body of information (often unstructured in the form of natural human language) so that it can be assimilated, reasoned about, and ultimately harnessed. Relation extraction is an important natural language task toward that end. In relation extraction, semantic relationships are extracted from natural human language in the form of (subject, object, predicate) triples such that subject and object are mentions of discrete concepts and predicate indicates the type of relation between them. The difficulty of relation extraction becomes clear when we consider the myriad of ways the same relation can be expressed in natural language. Much of the current works in relation extraction assume that entities are known at extraction time, thus treating entity recognition as an entirely separate and independent task. However, recent studies have shown that entity recognition and relation extraction, when modeled together as interdependent tasks, can lead to overall improvements in extraction accuracy. When modeled in such a manner, the task is referred to as end-to-end relation extraction. In this work, we present four studies that introduce incrementally sophisticated architectures designed to tackle the task of end-to-end relation extraction. In the first study, we present a pipeline approach for extracting protein-protein interactions as affected by particular mutations. The pipeline system makes use of recurrent neural networks for protein detection, lexicons for gene normalization, and convolutional neural networks for relation extraction. In the second study, we show that a multi-task learning framework, with parameter sharing, can achieve state-of-the-art results for drug-drug interaction extraction. At its core, the model uses graph convolutions, with a novel attention-gating mechanism, over dependency parse trees. In the third study, we present a more efficient and general-purpose end-to-end neural architecture designed around the idea of the table-filling paradigm; for an input sentence of length n, all entities and relations are extracted in a single pass of the network in an indirect fashion by populating the cells of a corresponding n by n table using metric-based features. We show that this approach excels in both the general English and biomedical domains with extraction times that are up to an order of magnitude faster compared to the prior best. In the fourth and last study, we present an architecture for relation extraction that, in addition to being end-to-end, is able to handle cross-sentence and N-ary relations. Overall, our work contributes to the advancement of modern information extraction by exploring end-to-end solutions that are fast, accurate, and generalizable to many high-value domains

Ontologies and Information Extraction

This report argues that, even in the simplest cases, IE is an ontology-driven process. It is not a mere text filtering method based on simple pattern matching and keywords, because the extracted pieces of texts are interpreted with respect to a predefined partial domain model. This report shows that depending on the nature and the depth of the interpretation to be done for extracting the information, more or less knowledge must be involved. This report is mainly illustrated in biology, a domain in which there are critical needs for content-based exploration of the scientific literature and which becomes a major application domain for IE

Mining Heterogeneous Multivariate Time-Series for Learning Meaningful Patterns: Application to Home Health Telecare

For the last years, time-series mining has become a challenging issue for researchers. An important application lies in most monitoring purposes, which require analyzing large sets of time-series for learning usual patterns. Any deviation from this learned profile is then considered as an unexpected situation. Moreover, complex applications may involve the temporal study of several heterogeneous parameters. In that paper, we propose a method for mining heterogeneous multivariate time-series for learning meaningful patterns. The proposed approach allows for mixed time-series -- containing both pattern and non-pattern data -- such as for imprecise matches, outliers, stretching and global translating of patterns instances in time. We present the early results of our approach in the context of monitoring the health status of a person at home. The purpose is to build a behavioral profile of a person by analyzing the time variations of several quantitative or qualitative parameters recorded through a provision of sensors installed in the home

Econometrics meets sentiment : an overview of methodology and applications

The advent of massive amounts of textual, audio, and visual data has spurred the development of econometric methodology to transform qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and to use those variables in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables. We survey this emerging research field and refer to it as sentometrics, which is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. We provide a synthesis of the relevant methodological approaches, illustrate with empirical results, and discuss useful software