397 research outputs found

    Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

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    The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

    Exploiting multimedia in creating and analysing multimedia Web archives

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    The data contained on the web and the social web are inherently multimedia and consist of a mixture of textual, visual and audio modalities. Community memories embodied on the web and social web contain a rich mixture of data from these modalities. In many ways, the web is the greatest resource ever created by human-kind. However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of the web, its content changes, appears and disappears on a daily basis. Web archiving provides a way of capturing snapshots of (parts of) the web for preservation and future analysis. This paper provides an overview of techniques we have developed within the context of the EU funded ARCOMEM (ARchiving COmmunity MEMories) project to allow multimedia web content to be leveraged during the archival process and for post-archival analysis. Through a set of use cases, we explore several practical applications of multimedia analytics within the realm of web archiving, web archive analysis and multimedia data on the web in general

    Grounding natural language phrases in images and video

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    Grounding language in images has shown it can help improve performance on many image-language tasks. To spur research on this topic, this dissertation introduces a new dataset which provides the ground truth annotations of the location of noun phrase chunks in image captions. I begin by introducing a constituent task termed phrase localization, where the goal is to localize an entity known to exist in an image when provided with a natural language query. To address this task, I introduce a model which learns a set of models, each of which capture a different concept which is useful in our task. These concepts can be predefined, such as attributes gleamed from the adjectives, as well as those which are automatically learned in a single-end-to-end neural network. I also address the more challenging detection style task, where the goal is to localize a phrase and determine if it is associated with an image. Multiple applications of the models presented in this work demonstrate their value beyond the phrase localization task

    Investigating the role of linguistic knowledge in vision and language tasks

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    Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the way we interact with technology e.g., chatbots, voice-based assistants, smart devices, and so on. One particular area that has gained tremendous attention and importance is learning through multimodal data sources within AI systems. By incorporating multimodal learning into AI systems, we can bridge the gap between human and machine communication, enabling more intuitive and natural interactions. Multimodal learning is the integration of multiple sensory modalities, such as text, images, speech, and gestures, to enable machines to understand and interpret humans and the world around us more comprehensively. In this thesis we develop strategies to exploit multimodal data (specifically text and images) along with linguistic knowledge, making multimodal systems more reliable and accurate for various vision and language tasks. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on developing AI systems that can understand the visual world around us and respond in a more natural and human-like manner. This task is popularly known as image captioning. Despite the significant progress in this task, the image captions generated by the models are extremely generic and template-like for visually similar images. We address this limitation and generate detailed and image-specific captions by exploiting prior and implicit linguistic knowledge, without the need for more labeled data or computational overhead. Unlike previous work, our proposed method generates captions that reflect the image in detail. To further allow AI models to better understand and interpret context, in the second part of the thesis we leverage information from multiple modalities to gather a more comprehensive understanding of the visual data by generating scene graphs. Unlike image captioning that provides a high-level interpretation of the scene, in this setting a key question is – how do different objects/entities in the scene interact with each other? Collecting large amounts of labeled data that can capture every possible interaction is very expensive and infeasible. Hence, we propose an efficient training strategy that generates complete and informative scene graphs from incomplete and missing labels using the knowledge of label informativeness from linguistics. In the third part of the thesis, we study the narrative descriptions of images generated from human speech i.e., natural language, to enable natural interaction between humans and machines. One fundamental and challenging problem when dealing with natural language is the task of coreference resolution. For example, in the sentence “John saw a dog. He petted it,” coreference resolution determines that “he” refers to “John” and “it” refers to the “dog.” While coreference resolution may seem straightforward to humans, it poses several significant challenges for AI systems. Without proper coreference resolution, models will struggle to derive the correct meaning and produce coherent outputs. To address this important and complex problem, we propose a novel benchmark dataset for multimodal coreference resolution to evaluate coreference resolution in text and narrative grounding in images. We also propose a weakly supervised method with rule-based linguistic knowledge to address multimodal coreference resolution without a large supervised training dataset. Finally, we address the limitations of the weakly supervised learning setup in multimodal coreference resolution by proposing a semi-supervised learning strategy. By using a small labeled and a large unlabeled dataset with robust self-supervised and pseudo-labeled loss functions, we achieve strong performance gains for coreference resolution and narrative grounding in a data-efficient way. Our work addresses important aspects in vision and language and paves the way for interesting future avenues. In the last part of the thesis, we discuss in more detail directions for the future that are important for advancing the field and unlocking its full potential. Hence, continued research is needed to push the boundaries of multimodal learning

    A DATA DRIVEN APPROACH TO IDENTIFY JOURNALISTIC 5WS FROM TEXT DOCUMENTS

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    Textual understanding is the process of automatically extracting accurate high-quality information from text. The amount of textual data available from different sources such as news, blogs and social media is growing exponentially. These data encode significant latent information which if extracted accurately can be valuable in a variety of applications such as medical report analyses, news understanding and societal studies. Natural language processing techniques are often employed to develop customized algorithms to extract such latent information from text. Journalistic 5Ws refer to the basic information in news articles that describes an event and include where, when, who, what and why. Extracting them accurately may facilitate better understanding of many social processes including social unrest, human rights violations, propaganda spread, and population migration. Furthermore, the 5Ws information can be combined with socio-economic and demographic data to analyze state and trajectory of these processes. In this thesis, a data driven pipeline has been developed to extract the 5Ws from text using syntactic and semantic cues in the text. First, a classifier is developed to identify articles specifically related to social unrest. The classifier has been trained with a dataset of over 80K news articles. We then use NLP algorithms to generate a set of candidates for the 5Ws. Then, a series of algorithms to extract the 5Ws are developed. These algorithms based on heuristics leverage specific words and parts-of-speech customized for individual Ws to compute their scores. The heuristics are based on the syntactic structure of the document as well as syntactic and semantic representations of individual words and sentences. These scores are then combined and ranked to obtain the best answers to Journalistic 5Ws. The classification accuracy of the algorithms is validated using a manually annotated dataset of news articles

    Gesture in Automatic Discourse Processing

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    Computers cannot fully understand spoken language without access to the wide range of modalities that accompany speech. This thesis addresses the particularly expressive modality of hand gesture, and focuses on building structured statistical models at the intersection of speech, vision, and meaning.My approach is distinguished in two key respects. First, gestural patterns are leveraged to discover parallel structures in the meaning of the associated speech. This differs from prior work that attempted to interpret individual gestures directly, an approach that was prone to a lack of generality across speakers. Second, I present novel, structured statistical models for multimodal language processing, which enable learning about gesture in its linguistic context, rather than in the abstract.These ideas find successful application in a variety of language processing tasks: resolving ambiguous noun phrases, segmenting speech into topics, and producing keyframe summaries of spoken language. In all three cases, the addition of gestural features -- extracted automatically from video -- yields significantly improved performance over a state-of-the-art text-only alternative. This marks the first demonstration that hand gesture improves automatic discourse processing
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