This research paper proposes an approach called Lingua Franca that improves machine translation quality by utilizing information from a knowledge graph to translate named entities accurately. The accurate entity translation is crucial when applied to entity-oriented search including Knowledge Graph Question Answering systems. In a nutshell, the approach preserves recognized named entities with an entity-replacement technique during the translation process. It replaces the entities back with their labels found in a knowledge graph for the target language to ensure that questions are translated correctly before answering them using a Knowledge Graph Question Answering system. The paper also introduces an open-source modular framework that enables researchers to design their own named entity-aware machine translation pipelines. The presented experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the Lingua Franca approach in comparison to baseline Machine Translation models. The approach shows a statistically significant improvement in the quality provided by several Knowledge Graph Question Answering systems using Lingua Franca on different datasets.

In the last decade, a large number of knowledge graph (KG) completion approaches were proposed. Albeit effective, these efforts are disjoint, and their collective strengths and weaknesses in effective KG completion have not been studied in the literature. We extend Plumber, a framework that brings together the research community's disjoint efforts on KG completion. We include more components into the architecture of Plumber to comprise 40 reusable components for various KG completion subtasks, such as coreference resolution, entity linking, and relation extraction. Using these components, Plumber dynamically generates suitable knowledge extraction pipelines and offers overall 432 distinct pipelines. We study the optimization problem of choosing optimal pipelines based on input sentences. To do so, we train a transformer-based classification model that extracts contextual embeddings from the input and finds an appropriate pipeline. We study the efficacy of Plumber for extracting the KG triples using standard datasets over three KGs: DBpedia, Wikidata, and Open Research Knowledge Graph. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of Plumber in dynamically generating KG completion pipelines, outperforming all baselines agnostic of the underlying KG. Furthermore, we provide an analysis of collective failure cases, study the similarities and synergies among integrated components and discuss their limitations.

Question Answering (QA) has become an often used method to retrieve data as part of chatbots and other natural-language user interfaces. In particular, QA systems of official institutions have high expectations regarding the answers computed by the system, as the provided information might be critical. In this demonstration, we use the official COVID-19 QA system that was developed together with the German Federal government to provide German citizens access to data regarding incident values, number of deaths, etc. To ensure high quality, a component-based approach was used that enables exchanging data between QA components using RDF and validating the functionality of the QA system using SPARQL. Here, we will demonstrate how our solution enables developers of QA systems to use a descriptive approach to validate the quality of their implementation before the system's deployment and also within a live environment.

Providing access to information is the main and most important purpose of the Web. However, despite available easy-to-use tools (e.g., search engines, chatbots, question answering) the accessibility is typically limited by the capability of using the English language. This excludes a huge amount of people. In this work, we discuss Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) systems that aim at providing natural language access to data stored in Knowledge Graphs (KG). While several KGQA systems have been proposed, only very few have dealt with a language other than English. In this work, we follow our research agenda of enabling speakers of any language to access the knowledge stored in KGs. Because of the lack of native support for many languages, we use machine translation (MT) tools to evaluate KGQA systems regarding questions in languages that are unsupported by a KGQA system. In total, our evaluation is based on 8 different languages (including some that never were evaluated before). For the intensive evaluation, we extend the QALD-9 dataset for KGQA with Wikidata queries and high-quality translations. The extension was done in a crowdsourcing manner by native speakers of the different languages. By using multiple KGQA systems for the evaluation, we were enabled to investigate and answer the main research question: “Can MT be an alternative for multilingual KGQA systems?”. The evaluation results demonstrated that the monolingual KGQA systems can be effectively ported to the new languages with MT tools.

While RDF was designed to make data easily readable by machines, it does not make data easily usable by end-users. Question Answering (QA) over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is seen as the technology which is able to bridge this gap. It aims to build systems which are capable of extracting the answer to a user’s natural language question from an RDF dataset. In recent years, many approaches were proposed which tackle the problem of QA over KGs. Despite such efforts, it is hard and cumbersome to create a Question Answering system on top of a new RDF dataset. The main open challenge remains portability, i.e., the possibility to apply a QA algorithm easily on new and previously untested RDF datasets. In this publication, we address the problem of portability by presenting an architecture for a portable QA system. We present a novel approach called QAnswer KG, which allows the construction of on-demand QA systems over new RDF datasets. Hence, our approach addresses non-expert users in QA domain. In this paper, we provide the details of QA system generation process. We show that it is possible to build a QA system over any RDF dataset while requiring minimal investments in terms of training. We run experiments using 3 different datasets. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to design a process for non-expert users. We enable such users to efficiently create an on-demand, scalable, multilingual, QA system on top of any RDF dataset.

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.

Quantifying the coherence of a set of statements is a long standing problem with many potential applications that has attracted researchers from different sciences. The special case of measuring coherence of topics has been recently studied to remedy the problem that topic models give no guaranty on the interpretablity of their output. Several benchmark datasets were produced that record human judgements of the interpretability of topics. We are the first to propose a framework that allows to construct existing word based coherence measures as well as new ones by combining elementary components. We conduct a systematic search of the space of coherence measures using all publicly available topic relevance data for the evaluation. Our results show that new combinations of components outperform existing measures with respect to correlation to human ratings. nFinally, we outline how our results can be transferred to further applications in the context of text mining, information retrieval and the world wide web.

We present GERBIL, an evaluation framework for semantic entity annotation. The rationale behind our framework is to provide developers, end users and researchers with easy-to-use interfaces that allow for the agile, fine-grained and uniform evaluation of annotation tools on multiple datasets. By these means, we aim to ensure that both tool developers and end users can derive meaningful insights pertaining to the extension, integration and use of annotation applications. In particular, GERBIL provides comparable results to tool developers so as to allow them to easily discover the strengths and weaknesses of their implementations with respect to the state of the art. With the permanent experiment URIs provided by our framework, we ensure the reproducibility and archiving of evaluation results. Moreover, the framework generates data in machine-processable format, allowing for the efficient querying and post-processing of evaluation results. Finally, the tool diagnostics provided by GERBIL allows deriving insights pertaining to the areas in which tools should be further refined, thus allowing developers to create an informed agenda for extensions and end users to detect the right tools for their purposes. GERBIL aims to become a focal point for the state of the art, driving the research agenda of the community by presenting comparable objective evaluation results.

It is crucial for the success of a search-driven web application to answer users' queries in the best possible way. A common approach is to use click models for guessing the relevance of search results. However, these models are imprecise and waive valuable information one can gain from non-click user interactions. We introduce TellMyRelevance!---a novel automatic end-to-end pipeline for tracking cursor interactions at the client, analyzing these and learning according relevance models. Yet, the models depend on the layout of the search results page involved, which makes them difficult to evaluate and compare. Thus, we use a Random Mouse Cursor as an extension to our pipeline for generating layout-dependent baselines. Based on these, we can perform evaluations of real-world relevance models. A large-scale interaction log analysis showed that we can learn relevance models whose predictions compare favorably to predictions of an existing state-of-the-art click model.

Finding correlated words in large document collections is an important ingredient for text analytics. The naïve approach computes the correlations of each word against all other words and filters for highly correlated word pairs. Clearly, this quadratic method cannot be applied to real world scenarios with millions of documents and words. Our main contribution is to transform the task of finding highly correlated word pairs into a word clustering problem that is efficiently solved by locality sensitive hashing (LSH). A key insight of our new method is to note that the empirical Pearson correlation between two words is the cosine of the angle between the centered versions of their word vectors. The angle can be approximated by an LSH scheme. Although centered word vectors are not sparse, the computation of the LSH hash functions can exploit the inherent sparsity of the word data. This leads to an efficient way to detect collisions between centered word vectors having a small angle and therefore provides a fast algorithm to sample highly correlated word pairs. Our new method based on LSH improves run time complexity of the enhanced naïve algorithm. This algorithm reduces the dimensionality of the word vectors using random projection and approximates correlations by computing cosine similarity on the reduced and centered word vectors. However, this method still has quadratic run time. Our new method replaces the filtering for high correlations in the naïve algorithm with finding hash collisions, which can be done by sorting the hash values of the word vectors. We evaluate the scalability of our new algorithm to large text collections.