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Simon Razniewski

dblp:48/10142 · DBLP profile ↗
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54ranked-venue papers
11as first author
28since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-5410-218XORCID · verified

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 42 · 9 first-author · 20 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 29 · 6 first-author · 15 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 7 · 1 first-author · 5 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 4 · 2 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 1 first-authorSystems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Artificial intelligence
13 papers
Knowledge representation and reasoning · 49% Information extraction and text analysis · 24% Language models and text generation · 14%
Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
15 papers
Knowledge graphs · 43% Information retrieval · 33% Data models and query languages · 7%
Theoretical computer science
3 papers
Logic in computer science · 75% Computational complexity · 25%

Topics — the 30 heaviest of 51, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning › commonsense reasoning
commonsense knowledge
2.342023
Extracting Cultural Commonsense Knowledge at Scale · WWW 2023
UnCommonSense in Action! Informative Negations for Commonsense Knowledge Bases · WSDM 2023
Advanced Semantics for Commonsense Knowledge Extraction · WWW 2021
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning › knowledge acquisition
knowledge base construction
1.932025
Enabling LLM Knowledge Analysis via Extensive Materialization · ACL (1) 2025
Advanced Semantics for Commonsense Knowledge Extraction · WWW 2021
Information to Wisdom: Commonsense Knowledge Extraction and Compilation · WSDM 2021
Natural language and speech › Information extraction and text analysis
open information extraction
1.832023
Refined Commonsense Knowledge From Large-Scale Web Contents · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2023
Extracting Cultural Commonsense Knowledge at Scale · WWW 2023
Advanced Semantics for Commonsense Knowledge Extraction · WWW 2021
Knowledge graphs
knowledge graph construction
1.332026
GPTKB v1.5: A Massive Knowledge Base for Exploring Factual LLM Knowledge · AAAI 2026
Extracting Cultural Commonsense Knowledge at Scale · WWW 2023
TiFi: Taxonomy Induction for Fictional Domains · WWW 2019
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning › commonsense reasoning
commonsense knowledge acquisition
1.122022
Do Children Texts Hold The Key To Commonsense Knowledge? · EMNLP 2022
Information to Wisdom: Commonsense Knowledge Extraction and Compilation · WSDM 2021
Knowledge graphs
knowledge graph querying
1.012026
GPTKB v1.5: A Massive Knowledge Base for Exploring Factual LLM Knowledge · AAAI 2026
Information retrieval › document retrieval
passage retrieval
1.012026
Is It Novel and Why? Fine-Grained Patent Novelty Prediction Based on Passage Retrieval · SIGIR 2026
Information retrieval › document retrieval › domain-specific retrieval › legal information retrieval
patent retrieval
1.012026
Is It Novel and Why? Fine-Grained Patent Novelty Prediction Based on Passage Retrieval · SIGIR 2026
Data models and query languages › RDF query language
SPARQL
1.012026
GPTKB v1.5: A Massive Knowledge Base for Exploring Factual LLM Knowledge · AAAI 2026
Program synthesis and code generation
code generation with language models
1.012026
A Solver-in-the-Loop Framework for Improving LLMs on Answer Set Programming for Logic Puzzle Solving · AAAI 2026
Logic in computer science › logic programming
answer set programming
1.012026
A Solver-in-the-Loop Framework for Improving LLMs on Answer Set Programming for Logic Puzzle Solving · AAAI 2026
Natural language and speech › Information extraction and text analysis › relation extraction
joint entity and relation extraction
0.912025
Enabling LLM Knowledge Analysis via Extensive Materialization · ACL (1) 2025
Knowledge graphs › knowledge graph quality
knowledge base completeness
0.822021
On the Limits of Machine Knowledge: Completeness, Recall and Negation in Web-scale Knowledge Bases · Proc. VLDB Endow. 2021
Predicting Completeness in Knowledge Bases · WSDM 2017
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning › statistical inference
bayesian inference
0.812024
QUITE: Quantifying Uncertainty in Natural Language Text in Bayesian Reasoning Scenarios · EMNLP 2024
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation › natural language understanding › question answering
probabilistic question answering
0.812024
QUITE: Quantifying Uncertainty in Natural Language Text in Bayesian Reasoning Scenarios · EMNLP 2024
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning
probabilistic reasoning
0.812024
QUITE: Quantifying Uncertainty in Natural Language Text in Bayesian Reasoning Scenarios · EMNLP 2024
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning › commonsense reasoning
commonsense knowledge base
0.712023
UnCommonSense in Action! Informative Negations for Commonsense Knowledge Bases · WSDM 2023
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning › commonsense reasoning
cultural commonsense
0.712023
Extracting Cultural Commonsense Knowledge at Scale · WWW 2023
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning › logic programming
negation
0.712023
UnCommonSense in Action! Informative Negations for Commonsense Knowledge Bases · WSDM 2023
Knowledge graphs
commonsense knowledge
0.712023
Refined Commonsense Knowledge From Large-Scale Web Contents · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2023
Knowledge graphs
link prediction
0.622021
Wikinegata: a Knowledge Base with Interesting Negative Statements · Proc. VLDB Endow. 2021
Completeness-aware Rule Learning from Knowledge Graphs · IJCAI 2018
Query processing and optimization › aggregate query processing
count query
0.612022
Answering Count Queries with Explanatory Evidence · SIGIR 2022
Information retrieval › interactive information retrieval
explainable search
0.612022
Answering Count Queries with Explanatory Evidence · SIGIR 2022
Information retrieval
question answering
0.612022
Answering Count Queries with Explanatory Evidence · SIGIR 2022
Natural language and speech › Information extraction and text analysis › document understanding › table recognition
web table extraction
0.512021
Extracting Contextualized Quantity Facts from Web Tables · WWW 2021
Information retrieval › retrieval evaluation
recall estimation
0.512021
On the Limits of Machine Knowledge: Completeness, Recall and Negation in Web-scale Knowledge Bases · Proc. VLDB Endow. 2021
Natural language and speech › Information extraction and text analysis
entity typing
0.412020
ENTYFI: Entity Typing in Fictional Texts · WSDM 2020
Natural language and speech › Information extraction and text analysis
named entity recognition
0.412020
ENTYFI: Entity Typing in Fictional Texts · WSDM 2020
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning
ontology
0.412020
ENTYFI: Entity Typing in Fictional Texts · WSDM 2020
Data integration and cleaning
ontology-based data access
0.412020
Counting Query Answers over a DL-Lite Knowledge Base · IJCAI 2020

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

supervised fine-tuning · 2.0solver-in-the-loop · 2.0massive-recursive LLM knowledge materialization · 2.0best-of-n sampling · 2.0ranking · 1.3open information extraction · 1.3distribution-aware prediction · 1.3cleaning · 1.3classification-based filtering · 1.3fine-grained retrieval · 1.0result consolidation · 0.9recursive querying · 0.9neuro-symbolic reasoning · 0.8logic-based reasoning · 0.8inference · 0.6contextualization · 0.6statistical patterns · 0.5peer-based ranking · 0.5
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 GPTKB v1.5: A Massive Knowledge Base for Exploring Factual LLM Knowledge
abstract
Language models are powerful artifacts, yet their factual knowledge is still poorly understood, and inaccessible to ad-hoc browsing and scalable statistical analysis. This demonstration introduces GPTKB v1.5, a densely interlinked 100-million-triple knowledge base (KB) built for $14,000 from GPT-4.1, using the GPTKB methodology for massive-recursive LLM knowledge materialization. This demo focuses on three use cases: (1) link-traversal-based LLM knowledge exploration, (2) SPARQL-based structured LLM knowledge querying, (3) comparative exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of LLM knowledge. Massive-recursive LLM knowledge materialization is a groundbreaking opportunity both for the systematic analysis of LLM knowledge, as well as for automated KB construction.
Tuan-Phong Nguyen, Shrestha Ghosh, Simon Razniewski
AAAI5
2026 A Solver-in-the-Loop Framework for Improving LLMs on Answer Set Programming for Logic Puzzle Solving
abstract
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has sparked interest in coding assistants. While general-purpose programming languages are well supported, generating code for domain-specific languages remains a challenging problem for LLMs. In this paper, we focus on the LLM-based generation of code for Answer Set Programming (ASP), a particularly effective approach for finding solutions to combinatorial search problems. The effectiveness of LLMs in ASP code generation is currently hindered by the limited number of examples seen during their initial pre-training phase. In this paper, we introduce a novel ASP-solver-in-the-loop approach for solver-guided instruction-tuning of LLMs to addressing the highly complex semantic parsing task inherent in ASP code generation. Our method only requires problem specifications in natural language and their solutions. Specifically, we sample ASP statements for program continuations from LLMs for unriddling logic puzzles. Leveraging the special property of declarative ASP programming that partial encodings increasingly narrow down the solution space, we categorize them into chosen and rejected instances based on solver feedback. We then apply supervised fine-tuning to train LLMs on the curated data and further improve robustness using a solver-guided search that includes best-of-N sampling. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in two distinct prompting settings on two datasets.
Timo Pierre Schrader, Lukas Lange, Tobias Kaminski, Simon Razniewski, Annemarie Friedrich
AAAI4
2026 Is It Novel and Why? Fine-Grained Patent Novelty Prediction Based on Passage Retrieval
Valentin Knappich, Anna Hätty, Simon Razniewski, Annemarie Friedrich
SIGIR3
2025 Enabling LLM Knowledge Analysis via Extensive Materialization
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have majorly advanced NLP and AI, and next to their ability to perform a wide range of procedural tasks, a major success factor is their internalized factual knowledge.Since Petroni et al. (2019), analyzing this knowledge has gained attention.However, most approaches investigate one question at a time via modest-sized pre-defined samples, introducing an "availability bias" (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973) that prevents the analysis of knowledge (or beliefs) of LLMs beyond the experimenter's predisposition.To address this challenge, we propose a novel methodology to comprehensively materialize an LLM's factual knowledge through recursive querying and result consolidation.Our approach is a milestone for LLM research, for the first time providing constructive insights into the scope and structure of LLM knowledge (or beliefs).As a prototype, we extract a knowledge base (KB) comprising 101 million relational triples for over 2.9 million entities from GPT-4o-mini.We use this KB to exemplarily analyze GPT-4o-mini's factual knowledge in terms of scale, accuracy, bias, cutoff and consistency, at the same time.Our resource is accessible at https://gptkb.org.
Tuan-Phong Nguyen, Shrestha Ghosh, Simon Razniewski
ACL (1)4
2025 L3X: Long Object List Extraction from Long Documents
abstract
Information extraction with LLMs is typically geared toward extracting individual subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples from short factual texts such as Wikipedia or news articles. In contrast, the L3X methodology tackles the task of extracting long lists from long texts: given a target subject S and predicate P, the goal is to extract the complete list of all objects O for which SPO holds. This is especially challenging over long texts, like entire books or large web crawls, where many objects are long-tail entities. We demonstrate L3X, a web-based system designed for this previously unexplored task. L3X comprises of recall-oriented candidate generation using LLMs in RAG mode, with novel methods for ranking and batching passages, followed by precision-oriented scrutinization. Our demo supports exploring multiple configurations, including LLM-only and RAG baselines, showcasing use cases like fiction-character relations from book series (e.g., 50+ friends of Harry Potter) and business relations from web pages (e.g., CEOs of Toyota).
Sneha Singhania, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
CIKM2
2025 AGENTS-LLM: Augmentative GENeration of Challenging Traffic Scenarios with an Agentic LLM Framework
abstract
Rare, yet critical, scenarios pose a significant challenge in testing and evaluating autonomous driving planners. Relying solely on real-world driving scenes requires collecting massive datasets to capture these scenarios. While automatic generation of traffic scenarios appears promising, data-driven models require extensive training data and often lack fine-grained control over the output. Moreover, generating novel scenarios from scratch can introduce a distributional shift from the original training scenes which undermines the validity of evaluations especially for learning-based planners. To sidestep this, recent work proposes to generate challenging scenarios by augmenting original scenarios from the test set. However, this involves the manual augmentation of scenarios by domain experts. An approach that is unable to meet the demands for scale in the evaluation of self-driving systems. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel LLM-agent based framework for augmenting real-world traffic scenarios using natural language descriptions, addressing the limitations of existing methods. A key innovation is the use of an agentic design, enabling fine-grained control over the output and maintaining high performance even with smaller, cost-effective LLMs. Extensive human expert evaluation demonstrates our framework’s ability to accurately adhere to user intent, generating high quality augmented scenarios comparable to those created manually.
Salil Bhatnagar, Markus Mazzola, Vasileios Belagiannis, Igor Gilitschenski, Luigi Palmieri, Simon Razniewski, Marcel Hallgarten
IROS7
2024 Cultural Commonsense Knowledge for Intercultural Dialogues
abstract
Despite recent progress, large language models (LLMs) still face the challenge of appropriately reacting to the intricacies of social and cultural conventions. This paper presents Mango, a methodology for distilling high-accuracy, high-recall assertions of cultural knowledge. We judiciously and iteratively prompt LLMs for this purpose from two entry points, concepts and cultures. Outputs are consolidated via clustering and generative summarization. Running the Mango method with GPT-3.5 as underlying LLM yields 167K high-accuracy assertions for 30K concepts and 11K cultures, surpassing prior resources by a large margin in quality and size. In an extrinsic evaluation for intercultural dialogues, we explore augmenting dialogue systems with cultural knowledge assertions. Notably, despite LLMs inherently possessing cultural knowledge, we find that adding knowledge from Mango improves the overall quality, specificity, and cultural sensitivity of dialogue responses, as judged by human annotators. Data and code are available for download.
Tuan-Phong Nguyen, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
CIKM2
2024 QUITE: Quantifying Uncertainty in Natural Language Text in Bayesian Reasoning Scenarios
abstract
Reasoning is key to many decision making processes.It requires consolidating a set of rulelike premises that are often associated with degrees of uncertainty and observations to draw conclusions.In this work, we address both the case where premises are specified as numeric probabilistic rules and situations in which humans state their estimates using words expressing degrees of certainty.Existing probabilistic reasoning datasets simplify the task, e.g., by requiring the model to only rank textual alternatives, by including only binary random variables, or by making use of a limited set of templates that result in less varied text.In this work, we present QUITE, a question answering dataset of real-world Bayesian reasoning scenarios with categorical random variables and complex relationships.QUITE provides high-quality natural language verbalizations of premises together with evidence statements, and expects the answer to a question in the form of an estimated probability.We conduct an extensive set of experiments, finding that logic-based models outperform out-of-the-box large language models on all reasoning types (causal, evidential, and explaining-away).Our results provide evidence that neuro-symbolic models are a promising direction for improving complex reasoning.We release QUITE and code for training and experiments on Github. 1
Timo Pierre Schrader, Lukas Lange, Simon Razniewski, Annemarie Friedrich
EMNLP3
2023 Evaluating Language Models for Knowledge Base Completion
Blerta Veseli, Sneha Singhania, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
ESWC3
2023 Wiki-Based Communities of Interest: Demographics and Outliers
abstract
In this paper, we release data about demographic information and outliers of communities of interest. Identified from Wiki-based sources, mainly Wikidata, the data covers 7.5k communities, e.g., members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and 345k subjects, e.g., Deborah Birx. We describe the statistical inference methodology adopted to mine such data. We release subject-centric and group-centric datasets in JSON format, as well as a browsing interface. Finally, we forsee three areas where this dataset can be useful: in social sciences research, it provides a resource for demographic analyses; in web-scale collaborative encyclopedias, it serves as an edit recommender to fill knowledge gaps; and in web search, it offers lists of salient statements about queried subjects for higher user engagement. The dataset can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7410436
Hiba Arnaout, Simon Razniewski, Jeff Z. Pan
ICWSM2
2023 Mapping and Cleaning Open Commonsense Knowledge Bases with Generative Translation
Julien Romero, Simon Razniewski
ISWC2
2023 UnCommonSense in Action! Informative Negations for Commonsense Knowledge Bases
abstract
Knowledge bases about commonsense knowledge i.e., CSKBs, are crucial in applications such as search and question answering. Prominent CSKBs mostly focus on positive statements. In this paper we show that materializing important negations increases the usability of CSKBs. We present Uncommonsense, a web portal to explore informative negations about everyday concepts: (i) in a research-focused interface, users get a glimpse into results-per-steps of the methodology; (ii) in a trivia interface, users can browse fun negative trivia about concepts of their choice; and (iii) in a query interface, users can submit triple-pattern queries with explicit negated relations and compare results with significantly less relevant answers from the positive-only baseline. It can be accessed at:https://uncommonsense.mpi-inf.mpg.de/.
Hiba Arnaout, Tuan-Phong Nguyen, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
WSDM3
2023 CoQEx: Entity Counts Explained
abstract
For open-domain question answering, queries on entity counts, such ashow many languages are spoken in Indonesia, are challenging. Such queries can be answered through succinct contexts with counts:estimated 700 languages, and instances:Javanese and Sundanese. Answer candidates naturally give rise to a distribution, where count contexts denoting the queried entity counts and their semantic subgroups often coexist, while the instances ground the counts in their constituting entities. In this demo we showcase the CoQEx methodology (Count Queries Explained) [5,6], which aggregates and structures explanatory evidence across search snippets, for answering user queries related to entity counts [4]. Given a entity count query, our system CoQEx retrieves search-snippets and provides the user with a distribution-aware prediction prediction, categorizes the count contexts into semantic groups and ranks instances grounding the counts, all in real-time. Our demo can be accessed athttps://nlcounqer.mpi-inf.mpg.de/.
Shrestha Ghosh, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
WSDM2
2023 Extracting Cultural Commonsense Knowledge at Scale
abstract
Structured knowledge is important for many AI applications. Commonsense knowledge, which is crucial for robust human-centric AI, is covered by a small number of structured knowledge projects. However, they lack knowledge about human traits and behaviors conditioned on socio-cultural contexts, which is crucial for situative AI. This paper presents Candle, an end-to-end methodology for extracting high-quality cultural commonsense knowledge (CCSK) at scale. Candle extracts CCSK assertions from a huge web corpus and organizes them into coherent clusters, for 3 domains of subjects (geography, religion, occupation) and several cultural facets (food, drinks, clothing, traditions, rituals, behaviors). Candle includes judicious techniques for classification-based filtering and scoring of interestingness. Experimental evaluations show the superiority of the Candle CCSK collection over prior works, and an extrinsic use case demonstrates the benefits of CCSK for the GPT-3 language model. Code and data can be accessed at https://candle.mpi-inf.mpg.de/.
Tuan-Phong Nguyen, Simon Razniewski, Aparna S. Varde, Gerhard Weikum
WWW2
2023 Refined Commonsense Knowledge From Large-Scale Web Contents
abstract
Commonsense knowledge (CSK) about concepts and their properties is helpful for AI applications. Prior works, such as ConceptNet, have compiled large CSK collections. However, they are restricted in their expressiveness to subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples with simple concepts for S and strings for P and O. This paper presents a method called ASCENT++ to automatically build a large-scale knowledge base (KB) of CSK assertions, with refined expressiveness and both better precision and recall than prior works. ASCENT++ goes beyond SPO triples by capturing composite concepts with subgroups and aspects, and by refining assertions with semantic facets. The latter is essential to express the temporal and spatial validity of assertions and further qualifiers. Furthermore, ASCENT++ combines open information extraction (OpenIE) with judicious cleaning and ranking by typicality and saliency scores. For high coverage, our method taps into the large-scale crawl C4 with broad web contents. The evaluation with human judgments shows the superior quality of the ASCENT++ KB, and an extrinsic evaluation for QA-support tasks underlines the benefits of ASCENT++. A web interface, data, and code can be accessed athttps:// ascentpp.mpi-inf.mpg.de/.
Tuan-Phong Nguyen, Simon Razniewski, Julien Romero, Gerhard Weikum
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.2
2023 Answering Count Questions with Structured Answers from Text
Shrestha Ghosh, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
J. Web Semant.2
2022 CSK-Detector: Commonsense in object detection
abstract
We propose an approach CSK-Detector for object detection and image categorization, well-suited for big data, by transferring commonsense knowledge from a knowledge base, augmented with premises and quantifiers. It is implemented for domestic robotics, especially with the motivation that next-generation and multipurpose domestic robots should be able to seamlessly discern environments for specific tasks without prior annotation of excessive images. CSK-Detector is evaluated on real data, yielding better results than deep learning without commonsense, while also providing an explainable approach. It broadly impacts human-robot collaboration and smart living.
Irina Chernyavsky, Aparna S. Varde, Simon Razniewski
IEEE Big Data3
2022 UnCommonSense: Informative Negative Knowledge about Everyday Concepts
abstract
Commonsense knowledge about everyday concepts is an important asset for AI applications, such as question answering and chatbots. Recently, we have seen an increasing interest in the construction of structured commonsense knowledge bases (CSKBs). An important part of human commonsense is about properties that do not apply to concepts, yet existing CSKBs only store positive statements. Moreover, since CSKBs operate under the open-world assumption, absent statements are considered to have unknown truth rather than being invalid. This paper presents the UNCOMMONSENSE framework for materializing informative negative commonsense statements. Given a target concept, comparable concepts are identified in the CSKB, for which a local closed-world assumption is postulated. This way, positive statements about comparable concepts that are absent for the target concept become seeds for negative statement candidates. The large set of candidates is then scrutinized, pruned and ranked by informativeness. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. A large dataset of informative negations is released as a resource for future research.
Hiba Arnaout, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum, Jeff Z. Pan
CIKM2
2022 Do Children Texts Hold The Key To Commonsense Knowledge?
abstract
Compiling comprehensive repositories of commonsense knowledge is a long-standing problem in AI.Many concerns revolve around the issue of reporting bias, i.e., that frequency in text sources is not a good proxy for relevance or truth.This paper explores whether children's texts hold the key to commonsense knowledge compilation, based on the hypothesis that such content makes fewer assumptions on the reader's knowledge, and therefore spells out commonsense more explicitly.An analysis with several corpora shows that children's texts indeed contain much more, and more typical commonsense assertions.Moreover, experiments show that this advantage can be leveraged in popular language-model-based commonsense knowledge extraction settings, where task-unspecific fine-tuning on small amounts of children texts (childBERT) already yields significant improvements.This provides a refreshing perspective different from the common trend of deriving progress from ever larger models and corpora.
Julien Romero, Simon Razniewski
EMNLP2
2022 Answering Count Queries with Explanatory Evidence
abstract
A challenging case in web search and question answering are count queries, such as"number of songs by John Lennon''. Prior methods merely answer these with a single, and sometimes puzzling number or return a ranked list of text snippets with different numbers. This paper proposes a methodology for answering count queries with inference, contextualization and explanatory evidence. Unlike previous systems, our method infers final answers from multiple observations, supports semantic qualifiers for the counts, and provides evidence by enumerating representative instances. Experiments with a wide variety of queries show the benefits of our method. To promote further research on this underexplored topic, we release an annotated dataset of 5k queries with 200k relevant text spans.
Shrestha Ghosh, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
SIGIR2
2022 Predicting Document Coverage for Relation Extraction
abstract
Abstract This paper presents a new task of predicting the coverage of a text document for relation extraction (RE): Does the document contain many relational tuples for a given entity? Coverage predictions are useful in selecting the best documents for knowledge base construction with large input corpora. To study this problem, we present a dataset of 31,366 diverse documents for 520 entities. We analyze the correlation of document coverage with features like length, entity mention frequency, Alexa rank, language complexity, and information retrieval scores. Each of these features has only moderate predictive power. We employ methods combining features with statistical models like TF-IDF and language models like BERT. The model combining features and BERT, HERB, achieves an F1 score of up to 46%. We demonstrate the utility of coverage predictions on two use cases: KB construction and claim refutation.
Sneha Singhania, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
Trans. Assoc. Comput. Linguistics2
2021 SANDI: Story-and-Images Alignment
abstract
The Internet contains a multitude of social media posts and other of stories where text is interspersed with images. In these contexts, images are not simply used for general illustration, but are judiciously placed in certain spots of a story for multimodal descriptions and narration. In this work we analyze the problem of text-image alignment, and present SANDI, a methodology for automatically selecting images from an image collection and aligning them with text paragraphs of a story. SANDI combines visual tags, user-provided tags and background knowledge, and uses an Integer Linear Program to compute alignments that are semantically meaningful. Experiments show that SANDI can select and align images with texts with high quality of semantic fit.
Sreyasi Nag Chowdhury, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
EACL2
2021 Information to Wisdom: Commonsense Knowledge Extraction and Compilation
abstract
Commonsense knowledge is a foundational cornerstone of artificial intelligence applications. Whereas information extraction and knowledge base construction for instance-oriented assertions, such as Brad Pitt's birth date, or Angelina Jolie's movie awards, has received much attention, commonsense knowledge on general concepts (politicians, bicycles, printers) and activities (eating pizza, fixing printers) has only been tackled recently. In this tutorial we present state-of-the-art methodologies towards the compilation and consolidation of such commonsense knowledge (CSK). We cover text-extraction-based, multi-modal and Transformer-based techniques, with special focus on the issues of web search and ranking, as of relevance to the WSDM community.
Simon Razniewski, Niket Tandon, Aparna S. Varde
WSDM1
2021 Extracting Contextualized Quantity Facts from Web Tables
abstract
Quantity queries, with filter conditions on quantitative measures of entities, are beyond the functionality of search engines and QA assistants. To enable such queries over web contents, this paper develops a novel method for automatically extracting quantity facts from ad-hoc web tables. This involves recognizing quantities, with normalized values and units, aligning them with the proper entities, and contextualizing these pairs with informative cues to match sophisticated queries with modifiers. Our method includes a new approach to aligning quantity columns to entity columns. Prior works assumed a single subject-column per table, whereas our approach is geared for complex tables and leverages external corpora as evidence. For contextualization, we identify informative cues from text and structural markup that surrounds a table. For query-time fact ranking, we devise a new scoring technique that exploits both context similarity and inter-fact consistency. Comparisons of our building blocks against state-of-the-art baselines and extrinsic experiments with two query benchmarks demonstrate the benefits of our method.
Vinh Thinh Ho, Koninika Pal, Simon Razniewski, Klaus Berberich, Gerhard Weikum
WWW3
2021 Advanced Semantics for Commonsense Knowledge Extraction
abstract
Commonsense knowledge (CSK) about concepts and their properties is useful for AI applications such as robust chatbots. Prior works like ConceptNet, TupleKB and others compiled large CSK collections, but are restricted in their expressiveness to subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples with simple concepts for S and monolithic strings for P and O. Also, these projects have either prioritized precision or recall, but hardly reconcile these complementary goals. This paper presents a methodology, called Ascent, to automatically build a large-scale knowledge base (KB) of CSK assertions, with advanced expressiveness and both better precision and recall than prior works. Ascent goes beyond triples by capturing composite concepts with subgroups and aspects, and by refining assertions with semantic facets. The latter are important to express temporal and spatial validity of assertions and further qualifiers. Ascent combines open information extraction with judicious cleaning using language models. Intrinsic evaluation shows the superior size and quality of the Ascent KB, and an extrinsic evaluation for QA-support tasks underlines the benefits of Ascent. A web interface, data and code can be found at https://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/ascent.
Tuan-Phong Nguyen, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
WWW2
2021 Wikinegata: a Knowledge Base with Interesting Negative Statements
abstract
Databases about general-world knowledge, so-called knowledge bases (KBs), are important in applications such as search and question answering. Traditionally, although KBs use open world assumption, popular KBs only store positive information, but withhold from taking any stance towards statements not contained in them. In this demo, we show that storing and presenting noteworthy negative statements would be important to overcome current limitations in various use cases. In particular, we introduce the Wiki neg ata portal, a platform to explore negative statements for Wikidata entities, by implementing a peer-based ranking method for inferring interesting negations in KBs. The demo is available at http://d5demos.mpi-inf.mpg.de/negation.
Hiba Arnaout, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum, Jeff Z. Pan
Proc. VLDB Endow.2
2021 On the Limits of Machine Knowledge: Completeness, Recall and Negation in Web-scale Knowledge Bases
abstract
General-purpose knowledge bases (KBs) are an important component of several data-driven applications. Pragmatically constructed from available web sources, these KBs are far from complete, which poses a set of challenges in curation as well as consumption. In this tutorial we discuss how completeness, recall and negation in DBs and KBs can be represented, extracted, and inferred. We proceed in 5 parts: (i) We introduce the logical foundations of knowledge representation and querying under partial closed-world semantics. (ii) We show how information about recall can be identified in KBs and in text, and (iii) how it can be estimated via statistical patterns. (iv) We show how interesting negative statements can be identified, and (v) how recall can be targeted in a comparative notion.
Simon Razniewski, Hiba Arnaout, Shrestha Ghosh, Fabian M. Suchanek
Proc. VLDB Endow.1
2021 Negative statements considered useful
Hiba Arnaout, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum, Jeff Z. Pan
J. Web Semant.2
2020 Structured Knowledge: Have we made progress? An extrinsic study of KB coverage over 19 years
abstract
Structured world knowledge is at the foundation of knowledge-centric AI applications. Despite considerable research on knowledge base construction, beyond mere statement counts, little is known about the progress of KBs, in particular concerning their coverage, and one may wonder whether there is constant progress, or diminishing returns. In this paper we employ question answering and entity summarization as extrinsic use cases for a longitudinal study of the progress of KB coverage. Our analysis shows a near-continuous improvement of two popular KBs, DBpedia and Wikidata, over the last 19 years, with little signs of flattening out or leveling off.
Simon Razniewski, Priyanka Das 0003
CIKM1
2020 Inside Quasimodo: Exploring Construction and Usage of Commonsense Knowledge
abstract
Quasimodo is an open-source commonsense knowledge base that significantly advanced the state of salient commonsense knowledge base construction. It introduced a pipeline that gathers, normalizes, validates and scores statements coming from query log and question answering forums. In this demonstration, we present a companion web portal which allows (i) to explore the data, (ii) to run and analyze the extraction pipeline live, and (iii) inspect the usage of Quasimodo's knowledge in several downstream use cases. The web portal is available at https://quasimodo.r2.enst.fr.
Julien Romero, Simon Razniewski
CIKM2
2020 Counting Query Answers over a DL-Lite Knowledge Base
abstract
Counting answers to a query is an operation supported by virtually all database management systems. In this paper we focus on counting answers over a Knowledge Base (KB), which may be viewed as a database enriched with background knowledge about the domain under consideration. In particular, we place our work in the context of Ontology-Mediated Query Answering/Ontology-based Data Access (OMQA/OBDA), where the language used for the ontology is a member of the DL-Lite family and the data is a (usually virtual) set of assertions. We study the data complexity of query answering, for different members of the DL-Lite family that include number restrictions, and for variants of conjunctive queries with counting that differ with respect to their shape (connected, branching, rooted). We improve upon existing results by providing PTIME and coNP lower bounds, and upper bounds in PTIME and LOGSPACE. For the LOGSPACE case, we have devised a novel query rewriting technique into first-order logic with counting.
Diego Calvanese, Julien Corman, Davide Lanti, Simon Razniewski
IJCAI4
2020 Illustrate Your Story: Enriching Text with Images
abstract
Human perception is known to be predominantly visual. As modern web infrastructure promoted the storage of media, the web-data paradigm shifted from text-only documents to those containing text and images. A multitude of blog posts, news articles, and social media posts exist on the Internet today as examples of multimodal stories. The manual alignment of images and text in a story is time-consuming and labor intensive. We present a web application for automatically selecting relevant images from an album and placing them in suitable contexts within a body of text. The application solves a global optimization problem that maximizes the coherence of text paragraphs and image descriptors, and allows for exploring the underlying image descriptors and similarity metrics. Experiments show that our method can align images with texts with high semantic fit, and to user satisfaction.
Sreyasi Nag Chowdhury, William Cheng, Gerard de Melo, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
WSDM4
2020 ENTYFI: Entity Typing in Fictional Texts
abstract
Fiction and fantasy are archetypes of long-tail domains that lack comprehensive methods for automated language processing and knowledge extraction. We present ENTYFI, the first methodology for typing entities in fictional texts coming from books, fan communities or amateur writers. ENTYFI builds on 205 automatically induced high-quality type systems for popular fictional domains, and exploits the overlap and reuse of these fictional domains for fine-grained typing in previously unseen texts. ENTYFI comprises five steps: type system induction, domain relatedness ranking, mention detection, mention typing, and type consolidation. The recall-oriented typing module combines a supervised neural model, unsupervised Hearst-style and dependency patterns, and knowledge base lookups. The precision-oriented consolidation stage utilizes co-occurrence statistics in order to remove noise and to identify the most relevant types. Extensive experiments on newly seen fictional texts demonstrate the quality of ENTYFI.
Cuong Xuan Chu, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
WSDM2
2020 Uncovering hidden semantics of set information in knowledge bases
Shrestha Ghosh, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
J. Web Semant.2
2019 Commonsense Properties from Query Logs and Question Answering Forums
abstract
Commonsense knowledge about object properties, human behavior and general concepts is crucial for robust AI applications. However, automatic acquisition of this knowledge is challenging because of sparseness and bias in online sources. This paper presents Quasimodo, a methodology and tool suite for distilling commonsense properties from non-standard web sources. We devise novel ways of tapping into search-engine query logs and QA forums, and combining the resulting candidate assertions with statistical cues from encyclopedias, books and image tags in a corroboration step. Unlike prior work on commonsense knowledge bases, Quasimodo focuses on salient properties that are typically associated with certain objects or concepts. Extensive evaluations, including extrinsic use-case studies, show that Quasimodo provides better coverage than state-of-the-art baselines with comparable quality.
Julien Romero, Simon Razniewski, Koninika Pal, Jeff Z. Pan, Archit Sakhadeo, Gerhard Weikum
CIKM2
2019 Coverage of Information Extraction from Sentences and Paragraphs
abstract
Simon Razniewski, Nitisha Jain, Paramita Mirza, Gerhard Weikum. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.
Simon Razniewski, Nitisha Jain, Paramita Mirza, Gerhard Weikum
EMNLP/IJCNLP (1)1
2019 Wikidata Completeness Profiling Using ProWD
abstract
Completeness is a crucial data quality aspect that deals with the question: do we have all the data we need? The lack of awareness on the completeness state of a knowledge graph (KG) may result in bias or even falsity for any decisions made based on the KG. Given a KG, one may be wondering how its completeness may vary across different topics. In this paper, we present ProWD, a framework and tool for profiling the completeness of Wikidata, a central KG on the (Semantic) Web that is open and free to use. ProWD measures the degree of completeness based on the Class-Facet-Attribute (CFA) profiles. A class denotes a collection of entities, which can be of multiple facets, allowing attribute completeness to be analyzed and compared, e.g., how does the completeness of the attribute "educated at" and "date of birth" compare between male, German computer scientists, and female, Indonesian computer scientists? ProWD generates summaries and visualizations for such analysis, giving insights into the KG completeness. ProWD is available online at~\urlhttp://prowd.id.
Avicenna Wisesa, Fariz Darari, Adila Krisnadhi, Werner Nutt, Simon Razniewski
K-CAP5
2019 TiFi: Taxonomy Induction for Fictional Domains
abstract
Taxonomies are important building blocks of structured knowledge bases, and their construction from text sources and Wikipedia has received much attention. In this paper we focus on the construction of taxonomies for fictional domains, using noisy category systems from fan wikis or text extraction as input. Such fictional domains are archetypes of entity universes that are poorly covered by Wikipedia, such as also enterprise-specific knowledge bases or highly specialized verticals. Our fiction-targeted approach, called TiFi, consists of three phases: (i) category cleaning, by identifying candidate categories that truly represent classes in the domain of interest, (ii) edge cleaning, by selecting subcategory relationships that correspond to class subsumption, and (iii) top-level construction, by mapping classes onto a subset of high-level WordNet categories. A comprehensive evaluation shows that TiFi is able to construct taxonomies for a diverse range of fictional domains such as Lord of the Rings, The Simpsons or Greek Mythology with very high precision and that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for taxonomy induction by a substantial margin.
Cuong Xuan Chu, Simon Razniewski, Gerhard Weikum
WWW2
2018 Completeness-aware Rule Learning from Knowledge Graphs
abstract
Knowledge graphs (KGs) are huge collections of primarily encyclopedic facts that are widely used in entity recognition, structured search, question answering, and similar. Rule mining is commonly applied to discover patterns in KGs. However, unlike in traditional association rule mining, KGs provide a setting with a high degree of incompleteness, which may result in the wrong estimation of the quality of mined rules, leading to erroneous beliefs such as all artists have won an award. In this paper we propose to use (in-)completeness meta-information to better assess the quality of rules learned from incomplete KGs. We introduce completeness-aware scoring functions for relational association rules. Experimental evaluation both on real and synthetic datasets shows that the proposed rule ranking approaches have remarkably higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art methods in uncovering missing facts.
Thomas Pellissier Tanon, Daria Stepanova 0001, Simon Razniewski, Paramita Mirza, Gerhard Weikum
IJCAI3
2018 Enriching Knowledge Bases with Counting Quantifiers
Paramita Mirza, Simon Razniewski, Fariz Darari, Gerhard Weikum
ISWC (1)2
2018 Completeness Management for RDF Data Sources
abstract
The Semantic Web is commonly interpreted under the open-world assumption, meaning that information available (e.g., in a data source) captures only a subset of the reality. Therefore, there is no certainty about whether the available information provides a complete representation of the reality. The broad aim of this article is to contribute a formal study of how to describe the completeness of parts of the Semantic Web stored in RDF data sources. We introduce a theoretical framework allowing augmentation of RDF data sources with statements, also expressed in RDF, about their completeness. One immediate benefit of this framework is that now query answers can be complemented with information about their completeness. We study the impact of completeness statements on the complexity of query answering by considering different fragments of the SPARQL language, including the RDFS entailment regime, and the federated scenario. We implement an efficient method for reasoning about query completeness and provide an experimental evaluation in the presence of large sets of completeness statements.
Fariz Darari, Werner Nutt, Giuseppe Pirrò, Simon Razniewski
ACM Trans. Web4
2017 Doctoral Advisor or Medical Condition: Towards Entity-Specific Rankings of Knowledge Base Properties
Simon Razniewski, Vevake Balaraman, Werner Nutt
ADMA1
2017 Completeness-Aware Rule Learning from Knowledge Graphs
Thomas Pellissier Tanon, Daria Stepanova 0001, Simon Razniewski, Paramita Mirza, Gerhard Weikum
ISWC (1)3
2017 Enabling Completeness-aware Querying in SPARQL
abstract
Current RDF knowledge bases (KBs) are highly incomplete. This incompleteness is a serious problem both for data users and producers. Users do not have guarantees that queries that are run on a KB deliver complete results. Data producers, on the other hand, are blind about the parts of the KB that are incomplete. Yet, completeness information management is poorly supported in the Semantic Web. No RDF storage engine supports reasoning with completeness statements. Moreover, SPARQL cannot express completeness constraints for queries. Motivated by these observations, this paper offers a vision on completeness-aware RDF querying. Our vision includes (1) the sketch of a method to reason about completeness in RDF knowledge bases, (2) two approaches to represent completeness information for SPARQL queries, and (3) an extension for the SPARQL language to express completeness constraints in queries.
Luis Galárraga, Katja Hose, Simon Razniewski
WebDB3
2017 Predicting Completeness in Knowledge Bases
abstract
Knowledge bases such as Wikidata, DBpedia, or YAGO contain millions of entities and facts. In some knowledge bases, the correctness of these facts has been evaluated. However, much less is known about their completeness, i.e., the proportion of real facts that the knowledge bases cover. In this work, we investigate different signals to identify the areas where a knowledge base is complete. We show that we can combine these signals in a rule mining approach, which allows us to predict where facts may be missing. We also show that completeness predictions can help other applications such as fact prediction.
Luis Galárraga, Simon Razniewski, Antoine Amarilli, Fabian M. Suchanek
WSDM2
2016 Optimizing Update Frequencies for Decaying Information
abstract
Many kinds of information, e.g., addresses, crawls of webpages, or academic affiliations, are prone to becoming outdated over time. Therefore, if data quality shall be maintained over time, often periodical refreshing is done. As refreshing data usually has a cost, for instance computation time, network bandwidth or human work time, a problem is to find the right update frequency depending on the benefit gained from the information and on the speed with which the information is expected to get outdated.
Simon Razniewski
CIKM1
2016 Enabling Fine-Grained RDF Data Completeness Assessment
Fariz Darari, Simon Razniewski, Radityo Eko Prasojo, Werner Nutt
ICWE2
2015 Identifying the Extent of Completeness of Query Answers over Partially Complete Databases
abstract
In many applications including loosely coupled cloud databases, collaborative editing and network monitoring, data from multiple sources is regularly used for query answering. For reasons such as system failures, insufficient author knowledge or network issues, data may be temporarily unavailable or generally nonexistent. Hence, not all data needed for query answering may be available.
Simon Razniewski, Flip Korn, Werner Nutt, Divesh Srivastava
SIGMOD Conference1
2015 Long-term Optimization of Update Frequencies for Decaying Information
abstract
Many kinds of information, such as addresses, crawls of webpages, or academic affiliations, are prone to becoming outdated over time. Therefore, in some applications, updates are performed periodically in order to keep the correctness and usefulness of such information high. As refreshing information usually has a cost, e.g. computation time, network bandwidth or human work time, a problem is to find the right update frequency depending on the benefit gained from the information and on the speed with which the information is expected to get outdated.
Simon Razniewski, Werner Nutt
WebDB1
2014 Adding completeness information to query answers over spatial databases
abstract
Real-life spatial databases are inherently incomplete. This is in particular the case when data from different sources are combined. An extreme example are volunteered geographical information systems like OpenStreetMap.
Simon Razniewski, Werner Nutt
SIGSPATIAL/GIS1
2013 Verification of Query Completeness over Processes
Simon Razniewski, Marco Montali, Werner Nutt
BPM1
2013 Completeness Statements about RDF Data Sources and Their Use for Query Answering
Fariz Darari, Werner Nutt, Giuseppe Pirrò, Simon Razniewski
ISWC (1)4
2012 Completeness of queries over SQL databases
abstract
Data completeness is an important aspect of data quality. We consider a setting, where databases can be incomplete in two ways: records may be missing and records may contain null values. We (i) formalize when the answer set of a query is complete in spite of such incompleteness, and (ii) we introduce table completeness statements, by which one can express that certain parts of a database are complete. We then study how to deduce from a set of table-completeness statements that a query can be answered completely.
Werner Nutt, Simon Razniewski
CIKM2
2011 Completeness of Queries over Incomplete Databases
Simon Razniewski, Werner Nutt
Proc. VLDB Endow.1