From Word to Sense Embeddings: A Survey on Vector Representations of Meaning

Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning. We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency, which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses (in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to different domains and compositionality.Comment: 46 pages, 8 figures. Published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Researc

An information retrieval approach to ontology mapping

In this paper, we present a heuristic mapping method and a prototype mapping system that support the process of semi-automatic ontology mapping for the purpose of improving semantic interoperability in heterogeneous systems. The approach is based on the idea of semantic enrichment, i.e., using instance information of the ontology to enrich the original ontology and calculate similarities between concepts in two ontologies. The functional settings for the mapping system are discussed and the evaluation of the prototype implementation of the approach is reported. \ud \u

Automatic extraction of knowledge from web documents

A large amount of digital information available is written as text documents in the form of web pages, reports, papers, emails, etc. Extracting the knowledge of interest from such documents from multiple sources in a timely fashion is therefore crucial. This paper provides an update on the Artequakt system which uses natural language tools to automatically extract knowledge about artists from multiple documents based on a predefined ontology. The ontology represents the type and form of knowledge to extract. This knowledge is then used to generate tailored biographies. The information extraction process of Artequakt is detailed and evaluated in this paper

Jumping Finite Automata for Tweet Comprehension

Every day, over one billion social media text messages are generated worldwide, which provides abundant information that can lead to improvements in lives of people through evidence-based decision making. Twitter is rich in such data but there are a number of technical challenges in comprehending tweets including ambiguity of the language used in tweets which is exacerbated in under resourced languages. This paper presents an approach based on Jumping Finite Automata for automatic comprehension of tweets. We construct a WordNet for the language of Kenya (WoLK) based on analysis of tweet structure, formalize the space of tweet variation and abstract the space on a Finite Automata. In addition, we present a software tool called Automata-Aided Tweet Comprehension (ATC) tool that takes raw tweets as input, preprocesses, recognise the syntax and extracts semantic information to 86% success rate

Automated schema matching techniques: an exploratory study

Manual schema matching is a problem for many database applications that use multiple data sources including data warehousing and e-commerce applications. Current research attempts to address this problem by developing algorithms to automate aspects of the schema-matching task. In this paper, an approach using an external dictionary facilitates automated discovery of the semantic meaning of database schema terms. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate the performance and accuracy of five schema-matching techniques with the proposed approach, called SemMA. The proposed approach and results are compared with two existing semi-automated schema-matching approaches and suggestions for future research are made