Resolving XML Semantic Ambiguity

ABSTRACT XML semantic-aware processing has become a motivating and important challenge in Web data management, data processing, and information retrieval. While XML data is semi-structured, yet it remains prone to lexical ambiguity, and thus requires dedicated semantic analysis and sense disambiguation processes to assign well-defined meaning to XML elements and attributes. This becomes crucial in an array of applications ranging over semantic-aware query rewriting, semantic document clustering and classification, schema matching, as well as blog analysis and event detection in social networks and tweets. Most existing approaches in this context: i) ignore the problem of identifying ambiguous XML nodes, ii) only partially consider their structural relations/context, iii) use syntactic information in processing XML data regardless of the semantics involved, and iv) are static in adopting fixed disambiguation constraints thus limiting user involvement. In this paper, we provide a new XML Semantic Disambiguation Framework titled XSDF designed to address each of the above motivations, taking as input: an XML document and a general purpose semantic network, and then producing as output a semantically augmented XML tree made of unambiguous semantic concepts. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in comparison with alternative methods. Categories and Subject Descriptors General Terms Algorithms, Measurement, Performance, Design, Experimentation. Keywords XML semantic-aware processing, a m b i g u i t y d e g r e e , s p h e r e neighborhood, XML context vector, semantic network, semantic disambiguation

Good Applications for Crummy Entity Linkers? The Case of Corpus Selection in Digital Humanities

Over the last decade we have made great progress in entity linking (EL) systems, but performance may vary depending on the context and, arguably, there are even principled limitations preventing a "perfect" EL system. This also suggests that there may be applications for which current "imperfect" EL is already very useful, and makes finding the "right" application as important as building the "right" EL system. We investigate the Digital Humanities use case, where scholars spend a considerable amount of time selecting relevant source texts. We developed WideNet; a semantically-enhanced search tool which leverages the strengths of (imperfect) EL without getting in the way of its expert users. We evaluate this tool in two historical case-studies aiming to collect a set of references to historical periods in parliamentary debates from the last two decades; the first targeted the Dutch Golden Age, and the second World War II. The case-studies conclude with a critical reflection on the utility of WideNet for this kind of research, after which we outline how such a real-world application can help to improve EL technology in general.Comment: Accepted for presentation at SEMANTiCS '1

Exploiting Semantics for Filtering and Searching Knowledge in a Software Development Context

Software development is still considered a bottleneck for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) in the advance of the Information Society. Usually, SMEs store and collect a large number of software textual documentation; these documents might be profitably used to facilitate them in using (and re-using) Software Engineering methods for systematically designing their applications, thus reducing software development cost. Specific and semantics textual filtering/search mechanisms, supporting the identification of adequate processes and practices for the enterprise needs, are fundamental in this context. To this aim, we present an automatic document retrieval method based on semantic similarity and Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) techniques. The proposal leverages on the strengths of both classic information retrieval and knowledge-based techniques, exploiting syntactical and semantic information provided by general and specific domain knowledge sources. For any SME, it is as easily and generally applicable as are the search techniques offered by common enterprise Content Management Systems (CMSs). Our method was developed within the FACIT-SME European FP-7 project, whose aim is to facilitate the diffusion of Software Engineering methods and best practices among SMEs. As shown by a detailed experimental evaluation, the achieved effectiveness goes well beyond typical retrieval solutions

SocialGQ: Towards semantically approximated and user-Aware querying of social-graph data

The proliferation of social and collaborative sites makes users increasingly active in the generation of socialgraph data; however, such sea of data often hinders them from finding the information they need. In this paper, we present SocialGQ ("Social-Graph Querying"), a novel approach for the effective and efficient querying of socialgraph data overcoming the limitations of typical search approaches proposed in the literature. SocialGQ allows users to compose complex queries in a simple way, and is able to retrieve useful knowledge (top-k answers) by jointly exploiting: (a) the structure of the graph, semantically approximating the user's requests with meaningful answers; (b) the unstructured textual resources of the graph; (c) its social and user-Aware dimension. An experimental evaluation comparing SocialGQ to leading approaches shows strong gains on a real social-graph data scenario

Unifying context with labeled property graph: A pipeline-based system for comprehensive text representation in NLP

Extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of unstructured digital text presents significant challenges across diverse domains. This research addresses this challenge by proposing a novel pipeline-based system that generates domain-agnostic and task-agnostic text representations. The proposed approach leverages labeled property graphs (LPG) to encode contextual information, facilitating the integration of diverse linguistic elements into a unified representation. The proposed system enables efficient graph-based querying and manipulation by addressing the crucial aspect of comprehensive context modeling and fine-grained semantics. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated through the implementation of NLP components that operate on LPG-based representations. Additionally, the proposed approach introduces specialized patterns and algorithms to enhance specific NLP tasks, including nominal mention detection, named entity disambiguation, event enrichments, event participant detection, and temporal link detection. The evaluation of the proposed approach, using the MEANTIME corpus comprising manually annotated documents, provides encouraging results and valuable insights into the system\u27s strengths. The proposed pipeline-based framework serves as a solid foundation for future research, aiming to refine and optimize LPG-based graph structures to generate comprehensive and semantically rich text representations, addressing the challenges associated with efficient information extraction and analysis in NLP

Knowledge-based Biomedical Data Science 2019

Knowledge-based biomedical data science (KBDS) involves the design and implementation of computer systems that act as if they knew about biomedicine. Such systems depend on formally represented knowledge in computer systems, often in the form of knowledge graphs. Here we survey the progress in the last year in systems that use formally represented knowledge to address data science problems in both clinical and biological domains, as well as on approaches for creating knowledge graphs. Major themes include the relationships between knowledge graphs and machine learning, the use of natural language processing, and the expansion of knowledge-based approaches to novel domains, such as Chinese Traditional Medicine and biodiversity.Comment: Manuscript 43 pages with 3 tables; Supplemental material 43 pages with 3 table