Semantics, Syndication and Social Networks: Mechanisms for Future Structured Information Spaces

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Semantics, Syndication and Social Networks
Mechanisms for Future Structured Information
Spaces Hamish Cunningham (University of
Sheffield) Werner Haas (Johaneum Research) Ant
Miller (BBC) Libby Miller (University of
Bristol) Ralph Traphoener (Empolis /
Bertelsmann) Paul Warren (British Telecom)
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Whats the difference between Mother Theresa and
Tony Bliar? http//gate.ac.uk/
http//nlp.shef.ac.uk/ Hamish Cunningham Dept.
Computer Science, University of Sheffield
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Why semantic metadata?

• Different types of metadata allow different types
  of search (but also incur different costs and
  have different limits)
• full text "find me Nevsky in Bulgaria"
• taxonomy / thesaurus / semantic annotation /
  ontology "find me churches in Eastern Europe"
• E.g. BBC's INFAX taxonomic system 66 of
  searches would fail if only full text
• The web promotes diversity but also
  fragmentation there's too much of it less and
  less impact for curated data
• In face of this cultural memory institutions need
  
• Syndication and mediation (to pool outlets and
  multiply impact) this means presentation-independ
  ent, multipurpose content
• Users as assistants (to cut the cost of
  metadata) this can mean shared
  conceptualisations of content
• How do we get there?

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The semantic web and why you can't have it (yet)

• The semantic web is about a semantic layer for
  interoperability, machine-readability, inference
  ideal for semantic libraries?
• Problems
• Construction and maintenance of shared
  taxonomies, terminologies ontologies is
  expensive
• Annotation of content relative to them is v.
  expensive
• How does a machine tell the difference between
  "Mother Theresa is a Saint" and "Tony Blair is a
  Saint"? (Beyond the shallow and the general we
  get into typical AI problems, the contextual and
  shifting nature of meaning, etc.)

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Four promising directions

1. Use recommender systems to make the users into
   curators assistants (who tells Google which page
   is important? other web users do, by linking
   also Amazon)
2. Allow curators and users to DIY simple specific
   ontologies and KBs (targetted adjuncts to general
   models like CIDOC)
3. Use Information Extraction (IE) to populate
   semantic models
4. Ride the next wave of social software and on-line
   communities (Wikis, Bloggs, OSN, file sharing /
   P2P, RSS/ATOM)

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IT context the Knowledge Economy and Human
Language

• Gartner, December 2002
• taxonomic and hierachical knowledge mapping and
  indexing will be prevalent in almost all
  information-rich applications
• through 2012 more than 95 of human-to-computer
  information input will involve textual language
• A contradiction
• to deal with the information deluge we need
  formal knowledge in semantics-based systems
• our archived history is in informal and ambiguous
  natural language
• The challenge to reconcile these two phenomena

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HLT Closing the Loop
KEY MNLG Multilingual Natural Language
GenerationOIE Ontology-aware Information
ExtractionAIE Adaptive IECLIE Controlled
Language IE
(M)NLG
Semantic Web Semantic GridSemantic Web
Services
Formal Knowledge(ontologies andinstance bases)
HumanLanguage
OIE
(A)IE
ControlledLanguage
CLIE
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Information Extraction

• Information Extraction (IE) pulls facts and
  structured information from the content of large
  text collections.
• Contrast IE and Information Retrieval
• NLP history from NLU to IE
• Progress driven by quantitative measures
• MUC Message Understanding Conferences
• ACE Advanced Content Extraction
• General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE)
  http//gate.ac.uk/

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IE Example

• The shiny red rocket was fired on Tuesday. It is
  the brainchild of Dr. Big Head. Dr. Head is a
  staff scientist at We Build Rockets Inc.

• NE "rocket", "Tuesday", "Dr. Head, "We Build
  Rockets"

• CO"it" rocket "Dr. Head" "Dr. Big Head"

• TE the rocket is "shiny red" and Head's
  "brainchild".

• TR Dr. Head works for We Build Rockets Inc.

• ST rocket launch event with various participants

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Ontology-based IE
XYZ was established on 03 November 1978 in
London. It opened a plant in Bulgaria in
Ontology KB
Location
Company
HQ
partOf
City
Country
type
type
HQ
type
type
establOn
partOf
03/11/1978
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A Necessary Trade-Off Domain specificity vs.
task complexity
general
acceptableaccuracy
specificity
domainspecific
complexity
complex
simple
bag-of-words
events
entities
relations
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Open information, defended communities

• Trend 1 seconds out, round 5 file sharing is
  about to go social
• Trend 2 the living room is about to be
  computerised
• What will happen when all your living room
  devices fold into a single PC?
• Bill Gates hopes you'll be running Windoze, but
  Consumer Electronics firms bet on Linux stable
  hardware (no viruses, no crashes, cheap, ...)
• What if these two trends combine? Ubiquitous
  on-line communities centred on shared content,
  with a model of trust
• What if memory institutions provide means of
  organising, explaining, interlinking the
  cross-over between modern popular culture and the
  curated memory?
• Important because DRM is the beginning of the end
  of civilisation as we know it (controls how you
  consume media you buy has the potential to be
  linked with censorship and with invasive
  behaviour logging)
• you can't make digital objects behave like
  physical objects - unless you totally control the
  hardware and the operating system
• if someone has control, then we may end up
  finding that someone has given the contract for
  preserving our culture to Haliburton

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Memory is not a luxury

• C21st all the C20th mistakes but bigger
  better?
• If you dont know where youve been, how can you
  know where youre going?
• Libraries, museums, archives ammunition in the
  war on ignorance (more dangerous than terror?)
• Ammunition is useless if you cant find it new
  technology must make our history accessible to
  all, for all our futures

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Summary

• Cultural memory can benefit from semantic
  metadata, presentation-independence and
  repurposing
• Semantic web technology
• no it wont make machines intelligent
• perhaps simple specific models can work
• Four ways to cross the AI bridge DIY models
  recommenders IE OSN P2P
• This talk http//gate.ac.uk/talks/ecdl-sept-2004.
  ppt
• More http//gate.ac.uk/ ? Related projects