2019, Fathalla, Said, Lange, Christoph, Auer, Sören, Hitzler, Pascal, Fernández, Miriam, Janowicz, Krzysztof, Zaveri, Amrapali, Gray, Alasdair J.G., Lopez, Vanessa, Haller, Armin, Hammar, Karl

Metadata of scientific events has become increasingly available on the Web, albeit often as raw data in various formats, disregarding its semantics and interlinking relations. This leads to restricting the usability of this data for, e.g., subsequent analyses and reasoning. Therefore, there is a pressing need to represent this data in a semantic representation, i.e., Linked Data. We present the new release of the EVENTSKG dataset, comprising comprehensive semantic descriptions of scientific events of eight computer science communities. Currently, EVENTSKG is a 5-star dataset containing metadata of 73 top-ranked event series (almost 2,000 events) established over the last five decades. The new release is a Linked Open Dataset adhering to an updated version of the Scientific Events Ontology, a reference ontology for event metadata representation, leading to richer and cleaner data. To facilitate the maintenance of EVENTSKG and to ensure its sustainability, EVENTSKG is coupled with a Java API that enables users to add/update events metadata without going into the details of the representation of the dataset. We shed light on events characteristics by analyzing EVENTSKG data, which provides a flexible means for customization in order to better understand the characteristics of renowned CS events.

2022, Oelen, Allard, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören, Aizawa, Akiko

As the number of published scholarly articles grows steadily each year, new methods are needed to organize scholarly knowledge so that it can be more efficiently discovered and used. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are able to autonomously process scholarly articles at scale and to create machine readable representations of the article content. However, autonomous NLP methods are by far not sufficiently accurate to create a high-quality knowledge graph. Yet quality is crucial for the graph to be useful in practice. We present TinyGenius, a methodology to validate NLP-extracted scholarly knowledge statements using microtasks performed with crowdsourcing. The scholarly context in which the crowd workers operate has multiple challenges. The explainability of the employed NLP methods is crucial to provide context in order to support the decision process of crowd workers. We employed TinyGenius to populate a paper-centric knowledge graph, using five distinct NLP methods. In the end, the resulting knowledge graph serves as a digital library for scholarly articles.

2020, Tavakoli, Mohammadreza, Elias, Mirette, Kismihók, Gábor, Auer, Sören, Chang, Maiga, Sampson, Demetrios G., Huang, Ronghuai, Hooshyar, Danial, Chen, Nian-Shing, Kinshuk, Pedaste, Margus

In the recent decade, online learning environments have accumulated millions of Open Educational Resources (OERs). However, for learners, finding relevant and high quality OERs is a complicated and time-consuming activity. Furthermore, metadata play a key role in offering high quality services such as recommendation and search. Metadata can also be used for automatic OER quality control as, in the light of the continuously increasing number of OERs, manual quality control is getting more and more difficult. In this work, we collected the metadata of 8,887 OERs to perform an exploratory data analysis to observe the effect of quality control on metadata quality. Subsequently, we propose an OER metadata scoring model, and build a metadata-based prediction model to anticipate the quality of OERs. Based on our data and model, we were able to detect high-quality OERs with the F1 score of 94.6%. © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

2020, Fathalla, S., Vahdati, S., Lange, C., Auer, Sören

One of the key channels of scholarly knowledge exchange are scholarly events such as conferences, workshops, symposiums, etc.; such events are especially important and popular in Computer Science, Engineering, and Natural Sciences.However, scholars encounter problems in finding relevant information about upcoming events and statistics on their historic evolution.In order to obtain a better understanding of scholarly event characteristics in four fields of science, we analyzed the metadata of scholarly events of four major fields of science, namely Computer Science, Physics, Engineering, and Mathematics using Scholarly Events Quality Assessment suite, a suite of ten metrics.In particular, we analyzed renowned scholarly events belonging to five sub-fields within Computer Science, namely World Wide Web, Computer Vision, Software Engineering, Data Management, as well as Security and Privacy.This analysis is based on a systematic approach using descriptive statistics as well as exploratory data analysis. The findings are on the one hand interesting to observe the general evolution and success factors of scholarly events; on the other hand, they allow (prospective) event organizers, publishers, and committee members to assess the progress of their event over time and compare it to other events in the same field; and finally, they help researchers to make more informed decisions when selecting suitable venues for presenting their work.Based on these findings, a set of recommendations has been concluded to different stakeholders, involving event organizers, potential authors, proceedings publishers, and sponsors. Our comprehensive dataset of scholarly events of the aforementioned fields is openly available in a semantic format and maintained collaboratively at OpenResearch.org.

2020, Elias, Mirette, Tavakoli, Mohammadreza, Lohmann, Steffen, Kismihok, Gabor, Auer, Sören, Gurreiro, Tiago, Nicolau, Hugo, Moffatt, Karyn

Open Educational Resources are becoming a significant source of learning that are widely used for various educational purposes and levels. Learners have diverse backgrounds and needs, especially when it comes to learners with accessibility requirements. Persons with disabilities have significantly lower employment rates partly due to the lack of access to education and vocational rehabilitation and training. It is not surprising therefore, that providing high quality OERs that facilitate the self-development towards specific jobs and skills on the labor market in the light of special preferences of learners with disabilities is difficult. In this paper, we introduce a personalized OER recommeder system that considers skills, occupations, and accessibility properties of learners to retrieve the most adequate and high-quality OERs. This is done by: 1) describing the profile of learners with disabilities, 2) collecting and analysing more than 1,500 OERs, 3) filtering OERs based on their accessibility features and predicted quality, and 4) providing personalised OER recommendations for learners according to their accessibility needs. As a result, the OERs retrieved by our method proved to satisfy more accessibility checks than other OERs. Moreover, we evaluated our results with five experts in educating people with visual and cognitive impairments. The evaluation showed that our recommendations are potentially helpful for learners with accessibility needs.

2020, Elias, Mirette, Ruckhaus, Edna, Draffan, E.A., James, Abi, Suárez-Figueroa, Mari Carmen, Lohmann, Steffen, Khiat, Abderrahmane, Auer, Sören, Chang, Maiga, Sampson, Demetrios G., Huang, Ronghuai, Hooshyar, Danial, Chen, Nian-Shing, Kinshuk, Pedaste, Margus

OpenCourseWare (OCW) has become a desirable source for sharing free educational resources which means there will always be users with differing needs. It is therefore the responsibility of OCW platform developers to consider accessibility as one of their prioritized requirements to ensure ease of use for all, including those with disabilities. However, the main challenge when creating an accessible platform is the ability to address all the different types of barriers that might affect those with a wide range of physical, sensory and cognitive impairments. This article discusses accessibility and personalization strategies and their realisation in the SlideWiki platform, in order to facilitate the development of accessible OCW. Previously, accessibility was seen as a complementary feature that can be tackled in the implementation phase. However, a meaningful integration of accessibility features requires thoughtful consideration during all project phases with active involvement of related stakeholders. The evaluation results and lessons learned from the SlideWiki development process have the potential to assist in the development of other systems that aim for an inclusive approach. © 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

2020, Say, Zeynep, Fathalla, Said, Vahdati, Sahar, Lehmann, Jens, Auer, Sören, Hall, Mark, Merčun, Tanja, Risse, Thomas, Duchateau, Fabien

The network of scholarly publishing involves generating and exchanging ideas, certifying research, publishing in order to disseminate findings, and preserving outputs. Despite enormous efforts in providing support for each of those steps in scholarly communication, identifying knowledge fragments is still a big challenge. This is due to the heterogeneous nature of the scholarly data and the current paradigm of distribution by publishing (mostly document-based) over journal articles, numerous repositories, and libraries. Therefore, transforming this paradigm to knowledge-based representation is expected to reform the knowledge sharing in the scholarly world. Although many movements have been initiated in recent years, non-technical scientific communities suffer from transforming document-based publishing to knowledge-based publishing. In this paper, we present a model (PharmSci) for scholarly publishing in the pharmaceutical research domain with the goal of facilitating knowledge discovery through effective ontology-based data integration. PharmSci provides machine-interpretable information to the knowledge discovery process. The principles and guidelines of the ontological engineering have been followed. Reasoning-based techniques are also presented in the design of the ontology to improve the quality of targeted tasks for data integration. The developed ontology is evaluated with a validation process and also a quality verification method.

2020, D'Souza, Jennifer, Auer, Sören

We describe an annotation initiative to capture the scholarly contributions in natural language processing (NLP) articles, particularly, for the articles that discuss machine learning (ML) approaches for various information extraction tasks. We develop the annotation task based on a pilot annotation exercise on 50 NLP-ML scholarly articles presenting contributions to five information extraction tasks 1. machine translation, 2. named entity recognition, 3. Question answering, 4. relation classification, and 5. text classification. In this article, we describe the outcomes of this pilot annotation phase. Through the exercise we have obtained an annotation methodology; and found ten core information units that reflect the contribution of the NLP-ML scholarly investigations. The resulting annotation scheme we developed based on these information units is called NLPContributions. The overarching goal of our endeavor is four-fold: 1) to find a systematic set of patterns of subject-predicate-object statements for the semantic structuring of scholarly contributions that are more or less generically applicable for NLP-ML research articles; 2) to apply the discovered patterns in the creation of a larger annotated dataset for training machine readers [18] of research contributions; 3) to ingest the dataset into the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) infrastructure as a showcase for creating user-friendly state-of-the-art overviews; 4) to integrate the machine readers into the ORKG to assist users in the manual curation of their respective article contributions. We envision that the NLPContributions methodology engenders a wider discussion on the topic toward its further refinement and development. Our pilot annotated dataset of 50 NLP-ML scholarly articles according to the NLPContributions scheme is openly available to the research community at https://doi.org/10.25835/0019761.

2020, Jaradeh, Mohamad Yaser, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören, Hall, Mark, Merčun, Tanja, Risse, Thomas, Duchateau, Fabien

Answering questions on scholarly knowledge comprising text and other artifacts is a vital part of any research life cycle. Querying scholarly knowledge and retrieving suitable answers is currently hardly possible due to the following primary reason: machine inactionable, ambiguous and unstructured content in publications. We present JarvisQA, a BERT based system to answer questions on tabular views of scholarly knowledge graphs. Such tables can be found in a variety of shapes in the scholarly literature (e.g., surveys, comparisons or results). Our system can retrieve direct answers to a variety of different questions asked on tabular data in articles. Furthermore, we present a preliminary dataset of related tables and a corresponding set of natural language questions. This dataset is used as a benchmark for our system and can be reused by others. Additionally, JarvisQA is evaluated on two datasets against other baselines and shows an improvement of two to three folds in performance compared to related methods.

2020, Vogt, Lars, D'Souza, Jennifer, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören

There is currently a gap between the natural language expression of scholarly publications and their structured semantic content modeling to enable intelligent content search. With the volume of research growing exponentially every year, a search feature operating over semantically structured content is compelling. Toward this end, in this work, we propose a novel semantic data model for modeling the contribution of scientific investigations. Our model, i.e. the Research Contribution Model (RCM), includes a schema of pertinent concepts highlighting six core information units, viz. Objective, Method, Activity, Agent, Material, and Result, on which the contribution hinges. It comprises bottom-up design considerations made from three scientific domains, viz. Medicine, Computer Science, and Agriculture, which we highlight as case studies. For its implementation in a knowledge graph application we introduce the idea of building blocks called Knowledge Graph Cells (KGC), which provide the following characteristics: (1) they limit the expressibility of ontologies to what is relevant in a knowledge graph regarding specific concepts on the theme of research contributions; (2) they are expressible via ABox and TBox expressions; (3) they enforce a certain level of data consistency by ensuring that a uniform modeling scheme is followed through rules and input controls; (4) they organize the knowledge graph into named graphs; (5) they provide information for the front end for displaying the knowledge graph in a human-readable form such as HTML pages; and (6) they can be seamlessly integrated into any existing publishing process thatsupports form-based input abstracting its semantic technicalities including RDF semantification from the user. Thus RCM joins the trend of existing work toward enhanced digitalization of scholarly publication enabled by an RDF semantification as a knowledge graph fostering the evolution of the scholarly publications beyond written text.