The measurement of knowledge gain in information retrieval has garnered significant attention, particularly in evaluating its relationship with user behaviors and its role in enhancing the learning experience by tracking progress toward learning objectives.Previous studies have focused on estimating knowledge acquisition based on a static and predefined representation of learning objectives for each search topic, assessing users' progress toward these fixed goals.However, users often differ in their interests, focusing on various aspects or subtopics within the same broader topic, which they express through diverse, topic-related queries.In this paper, we propose a personalized approach to knowledge gain measurement by adapting and extending an existing method for inferring learning subgoals based on user queries.Our approach extends this method by dynamically determining the number of subgoals for each user query, rather than using a fixed number.Knowledge gain estimation is then conducted based on these individualized subgoals while also incorporating the user's prior knowledge of the search topic to enhance personalization.Using 10 different topics, we compare our approach to a baseline method in which the learning goal representation remains uniform for all users within a given topic.

In the context of search as learning, users engage in search sessions to fill their information gaps and achieve their learning goals. Tracking the user’s state of knowledge is therefore essential for estimating how close they are to achieve these learning goals. In this respect, we extend a recently proposed approach that uses the recognition of entities present in the text to track the user’s knowledge. Our approach introduces a more complete representation by considering both the entities and their relations. More precisely, we represent both the user’s knowledge and the user’s learning goals (or target knowledge) as knowledge graphs.

A reliable representation of the user’s knowledge state during a learning search session is crucial to understand their real information needs. When a search system is aware of such a state, it can adapt the search results and provide greater support for the user’s learning objectives. A common practice to track the user’s knowledge state is to consider the content of the documents they read during their search session(s). However, most current work ignores entity mentions in the documents, which, when linked to knowledge graphs, can be a source of valuable information regarding the user’s knowledge. To fill this gap, we extend RULK—Representing User Knowledge in Search-as-Learning—with entity linking capabilities. The extended framework RULK represents and tracks user knowledge as a collection of such entities. It eventually estimates the user knowledge gain—learning outcome—by measuring the similarity between the represented knowledge and the learning objective. We show that our methods allow for up to 10% improvements when estimating user knowledge gains.

Information of the geographical and spatial type is found in numerous text documents and constitutes a very challenging target for extraction. Geoparsing applications have been developed to extract geographic terms. However, off-the-shelf Named Entity Recognition (NER) models are mainly designed for Toponym recognition and are very sensitive to language specificity. In this paper, we propose a workflow to first extract geographic and spatial entities based on a BiLSTM-CRF architecture with a concatenation of several text representations. We also propose a Relation Extraction module, particularly aimed at spatial relationships extraction, to build a structured Geospatial knowledge base. We demonstrate our pipeline by applying it to the case of French housing advertisements, which generally provide information about a property's location and neighbourhood. Our results show that the workflow tackles French language and the variability and irregularity of housing advertisements, generalizes Geoparsing to all geographic and spatial terms, and successfully retrieves most of the relationships between entities from the text.

Axiom learning is an essential task in enhancing the quality of an ontology, a task that sometimes goes under the name of ontology enrichment. To overcome some limitations of recent work and to contribute to the growing library of ontology learning algorithms, we propose an evolutionary approach to automatically discover axioms from the abundant RDF data resource of the Semantic Web. We describe a method applying an instance of an Evolutionary Algorithm, namely Grammatical Evolution, to the acquisition of OWL class disjointness axioms, one important type of OWL axioms which makes it possible to detect logical inconsistencies and infer implicit information from a knowledge base. The proposed method uses an axiom scoring function based on possibility theory and is evaluated against a Gold Standard, manually constructed by knowledge engineers. Experimental results show that the given method possesses high accuracy and good coverage.

We study the feasibility of using Belief, Desire and Intention agents for modeling the phenomena of urban growth and segregation. Uncertainty, typical of real world situations is modeled using possibility theory. We have also implemented a simple visualization tool whose aim is to track the changes in the model. Some preliminary experiments suggest that such an approach might allow a decision-maker to dynamically track the changes in the model. Besides, it is also possible to interact with the different steps of the simulation via the model. Our proposal makes it possible to simulate the interactions between cognitive agents in an economical environment while taking the spatial context into account.

In this paper, a simulation of a multi-agent recommender system is presented and developed in the NetLogo platform. The specification of this recommender system is based on the well known Belief-Desire-Intention agent architecture applied to multi-context systems, extended with contexts for additional reasoning abilities, especially social ones. The main goal of this simulation study is, besides illustrating the usefulness and feasibility of our agent-based recommender system in a realistic scenario, to understand how groups of agents behave in a social network compared to individual agents. Results show that agents within a social network have better collective performance than individual ones. The utility and the satisfaction of agents is increased by the exchange of messages when executing intentions.

Axiom scoring is a critical task both for the automatic enrichment/learning and for the automatic validation of knowledge bases and ontologies. We designed and developed an axiom scoring heuristic based on possibility theory, which aims at overcoming some limitations of scoring heuristics based on statistical inference and taking into account the open-world assumption of the linked data on the Web. Since computing the possibilistic score can be computationally quite heavy for some candidate axioms, we propose a method based on time capping to alleviate the computation of the heuristic without giving up the precision of the scores. We evaluate our proposal by applying it to the problem of testing SubClassOf axioms against the DBpedia RDF dataset.