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Now showing 1 - 10 of 22
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    Compact representations for efficient storage of semantic sensor data
    (Dordrecht : Springer Science + Business Media B.V, 2021) Karim, Farah; Vidal, Maria-Esther; Auer, Sören
    Nowadays, there is a rapid increase in the number of sensor data generated by a wide variety of sensors and devices. Data semantics facilitate information exchange, adaptability, and interoperability among several sensors and devices. Sensor data and their meaning can be described using ontologies, e.g., the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) Ontology. Notwithstanding, semantically enriched, the size of semantic sensor data is substantially larger than raw sensor data. Moreover, some measurement values can be observed by sensors several times, and a huge number of repeated facts about sensor data can be produced. We propose a compact or factorized representation of semantic sensor data, where repeated measurement values are described only once. Furthermore, these compact representations are able to enhance the storage and processing of semantic sensor data. To scale up to large datasets, factorization based, tabular representations are exploited to store and manage factorized semantic sensor data using Big Data technologies. We empirically study the effectiveness of a semantic sensor’s proposed compact representations and their impact on query processing. Additionally, we evaluate the effects of storing the proposed representations on diverse RDF implementations. Results suggest that the proposed compact representations empower the storage and query processing of sensor data over diverse RDF implementations, and up to two orders of magnitude can reduce query execution time.
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    Easy Semantification of Bioassays
    (Heidelberg : Springer, 2022) Anteghini, Marco; D’Souza, Jennifer; dos Santos, Vitor A. P. Martins; Auer, Sören
    Biological data and knowledge bases increasingly rely on Semantic Web technologies and the use of knowledge graphs for data integration, retrieval and federated queries. We propose a solution for automatically semantifying biological assays. Our solution contrasts the problem of automated semantification as labeling versus clustering where the two methods are on opposite ends of the method complexity spectrum. Characteristically modeling our problem, we find the clustering solution significantly outperforms a deep neural network state-of-the-art labeling approach. This novel contribution is based on two factors: 1) a learning objective closely modeled after the data outperforms an alternative approach with sophisticated semantic modeling; 2) automatically semantifying biological assays achieves a high performance F1 of nearly 83%, which to our knowledge is the first reported standardized evaluation of the task offering a strong benchmark model.
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    Why reinvent the wheel: Let's build question answering systems together
    (New York City : Association for Computing Machinery, 2018) Singh, K.; Radhakrishna, A.S.; Both, A.; Shekarpour, S.; Lytra, I.; Usbeck, R.; Vyas, A.; Khikmatullaev, A.; Punjani, D.; Lange, C.; Vidal, Maria-Esther; Lehmann, J.; Auer, Sören
    Modern question answering (QA) systems need to flexibly integrate a number of components specialised to fulfil specific tasks in a QA pipeline. Key QA tasks include Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation, Relation Extraction, and Query Building. Since a number of different software components exist that implement different strategies for each of these tasks, it is a major challenge to select and combine the most suitable components into a QA system, given the characteristics of a question. We study this optimisation problem and train classifiers, which take features of a question as input and have the goal of optimising the selection of QA components based on those features. We then devise a greedy algorithm to identify the pipelines that include the suitable components and can effectively answer the given question. We implement this model within Frankenstein, a QA framework able to select QA components and compose QA pipelines. We evaluate the effectiveness of the pipelines generated by Frankenstein using the QALD and LC-QuAD benchmarks. These results not only suggest that Frankenstein precisely solves the QA optimisation problem but also enables the automatic composition of optimised QA pipelines, which outperform the static Baseline QA pipeline. Thanks to this flexible and fully automated pipeline generation process, new QA components can be easily included in Frankenstein, thus improving the performance of the generated pipelines.
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    Ontology-Based Representation for Accessible OpenCourseWare Systems
    (Basel : MDPI Publ., 2018-11-29) Elias, Mirette; Lohmann, Steffen; Auer, Sören
    OpenCourseWare (OCW) systems have been established to provide open educational resources that are accessible by anyone, including learners with special accessibility needs and preferences. We need to find a formal and interoperable way to describe these preferences in order to use them in OCW systems and retrieve relevant educational resources. This formal representation should use standard accessibility definitions of OCW that can be reused by other OCW systems to represent accessibility concepts. In this article, we present an ontology to represent the accessibility needs of learners with respect to the IMS AfA specifications. The ontology definitions together with rule-based queries are used to retrieve relevant educational resources. Related to this, we developed a user interface component that enables users to create accessibility profiles representing their individual needs and preferences based on our ontology. We evaluated the approach with five examples profiles.
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    Ranking facts for explaining answers to elementary science questions
    (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2023) D’Souza, Jennifer; Mulang, Isaiah Onando; Auer, Sören
    In multiple-choice exams, students select one answer from among typically four choices and can explain why they made that particular choice. Students are good at understanding natural language questions and based on their domain knowledge can easily infer the question's answer by “connecting the dots” across various pertinent facts. Considering automated reasoning for elementary science question answering, we address the novel task of generating explanations for answers from human-authored facts. For this, we examine the practically scalable framework of feature-rich support vector machines leveraging domain-targeted, hand-crafted features. Explanations are created from a human-annotated set of nearly 5000 candidate facts in the WorldTree corpus. Our aim is to obtain better matches for valid facts of an explanation for the correct answer of a question over the available fact candidates. To this end, our features offer a comprehensive linguistic and semantic unification paradigm. The machine learning problem is the preference ordering of facts, for which we test pointwise regression versus pairwise learning-to-rank. Our contributions, originating from comprehensive evaluations against nine existing systems, are (1) a case study in which two preference ordering approaches are systematically compared, and where the pointwise approach is shown to outperform the pairwise approach, thus adding to the existing survey of observations on this topic; (2) since our system outperforms a highly-effective TF-IDF-based IR technique by 3.5 and 4.9 points on the development and test sets, respectively, it demonstrates some of the further task improvement possibilities (e.g., in terms of an efficient learning algorithm, semantic features) on this task; (3) it is a practically competent approach that can outperform some variants of BERT-based reranking models; and (4) the human-engineered features make it an interpretable machine learning model for the task.
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    EVENTSKG: A 5-Star Dataset of Top-Ranked Events in Eight Computer Science Communities
    (Berlin ; Heidelberg : Springer, 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.
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    NLPContributions: An Annotation Scheme for Machine Reading of Scholarly Contributions in Natural Language Processing Literature
    (Aachen : RWTH, 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.
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    TinyGenius: Intertwining natural language processing with microtask crowdsourcing for scholarly knowledge graph creation
    (New York,NY,United States : Association for Computing Machinery, 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.
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    Accessibility and Personalization in OpenCourseWare : An Inclusive Development Approach
    (Piscataway, NJ : IEEE, 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.
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    Analysing the requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph: use cases, quality requirements, and construction strategies
    (Berlin ; Heidelberg ; New York : Springer, 2021) Brack, Arthur; Hoppe, Anett; Stocker, Markus; Auer, Sören; Ewerth, Ralph
    Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get a full overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KG) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective and present a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting and reviewing daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications, and outline possible solutions.