Let's now look at some of the useful sites for finding open and publicly available datasets, quickly and without much hassle. Google Dataset Search is a search engine dedicated to finding datasets. It is a search engine over metadata from data providers. This implies that it indexes over the descriptions of a dataset instead of its content. So if a dataset is available publicly, there is a good chance, that it will pop up in the Google dataset search.

This work introduces Conditional Image Retrieval (CIR) systems: IR methods that can efficiently specialize to specific subsets of images on the fly. These systems broaden the class of queries IR systems support, and eliminate the need for expensive re-fitting to specific subsets of data. Specifically, we adapt tree-based K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) data-structures to the conditional setting by introducing additional inverted-index data-structures. This speeds conditional queries and does not slow queries without conditioning. We present two new datasets for evaluating the performance of CIR systems and evaluate a variety of design choices. As a motivating application, we present an algorithm that can explore shared semantic content between works of art of vastly different media and cultural origin. Finally, we demonstrate that CIR data-structures can identify Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) "blind spots": areas where GANs fail to properly model the true data distribution.

Deploying Machine Learning (ML) algorithms within databases is a challenge due to the varied computational footprints of modern ML algorithms and the myriad of database technologies each with their own restrictive syntax. We introduce an Apache Spark-based micro-service orchestration framework that extends database operations to include web service primitives. Our system can orchestrate web services across hundreds of machines and takes full advantage of cluster, thread, and asynchronous parallelism. Using this framework, we provide large scale clients for intelligent services such as speech, vision, search, anomaly detection, and text analysis. This allows users to integrate ready-to-use intelligence into any datastore with an Apache Spark connector. To eliminate the majority of overhead from network communication, we also introduce a low-latency containerized version of our architecture. Finally, we demonstrate that the services we investigate are competitive on a variety of benchmarks, and present two applications of this framework to create intelligent search engines, and real time auto race analytics systems.

Based on Semantic Web technologies, knowledge graphs help users to discover information of interest by using live SPARQL services. Answer-seekers often examine intermediate results iteratively and modify SPARQL queries repeatedly in a search session. In this context, understanding user behaviors is critical for effective intention prediction and query optimization. However, these behaviors have not yet been researched systematically at the SPARQL session level. This paper reveals the secrets of session-level user search behaviors by conducting a comprehensive investigation over massive real-world SPARQL query logs. In particular, we thoroughly assess query changes made by users w.r.t. structural and data-driven features of SPARQL queries. To illustrate the potentiality of our findings, we employ a proof-of-concept model to predict user intentions, i.e., future directions of the given session, and give reformulation suggestions based on the predicted intention. We hope the results presented here will help to devise efficient SPARQL caching, auto-completion, query suggestion, approximation, and relaxation techniques in the future.

Contextual bit -- as we have seen, keyword search can be (sometimes) limiting. Context is definitely highly beneficial to receive results that are semantically related to what you are looking for: when looking for "virus threat", "virus risks" also appear, etc

The 1st National workshop on Smart Farming and Data Analytics took place at Maynooth University in Ireland on June 12, 2019. The workshop included two invited keynote presentations, invited talks and breakout group discussions. The workshop attracted in the order of 50 participants, consisting of a mixture of computer scientists, general scientists, farmers, farm advisors, and agricultural business representatives. This allowed for lively discussion and cross-fertilization of ideas. And showed the significant interest in the smart farming domain, the many research challenges faced in the space and the potential for data analytics and information retrieval here.

We propose a new active learning (AL) framework, Active Learning++, which can utilize an annotator's labels as well as its rationale. Annotators can provide their rationale for choosing a label by ranking input features based on their importance for a given query. To incorporate this additional input, we modified the disagreement measure for a bagging-based Query by Committee (QBC) sampling strategy. Instead of weighing all committee models equally to select the next instance, we assign higher weight to the committee model with higher agreement with the annotator's ranking. Specifically, we generated a feature importance-based local explanation for each committee model. The similarity score between feature rankings provided by the annotator and the local model explanation is used to assign a weight to each corresponding committee model. This approach is applicable to any kind of ML model using model-agnostic techniques to generate local explanation such as LIME. With a simulation study, we show that our framework significantly outperforms a QBC based vanilla AL framework.

This thesis develops a conceptual framework considering social data as representing the surface layer of a hierarchy of human social behaviours, needs and cognition which is employed to transform social data into representations that preserve social behaviours and their causalities. Based on this framework two platforms were built to capture insights from fast-paced and slow-paced social data. For fast-paced, a self-structuring and incremental learning technique was developed to automatically capture salient topics and corresponding dynamics over time. An event detection technique was developed to automatically monitor those identified topic pathways for significant fluctuations in social behaviours using multiple indicators such as volume and sentiment. This platform is demonstrated using two large datasets with over 1 million tweets. The separated topic pathways were representative of the key topics of each entity and coherent against topic coherence measures. Identified events were validated against contemporary events reported in news. Secondly for the slow-paced social data, a suite of new machine learning and natural language processing techniques were developed to automatically capture self-disclosed information of the individuals such as demographics, emotions and timeline of personal events. This platform was trialled on a large text corpus of over 4 million posts collected from online support groups. This was further extended to transform prostate cancer related online support group discussions into a multidimensional representation and investigated the self-disclosed quality of life of patients (and partners) against time, demographics and clinical factors. The capabilities of this extended platform have been demonstrated using a text corpus collected from 10 prostate cancer online support groups comprising of 609,960 prostate cancer discussions and 22,233 patients.

Challenging problems such as open-domain question answering, fact checking, slot filling and entity linking require access to large, external knowledge sources. While some models do well on individual tasks, developing general models is difficult as each task might require computationally expensive indexing of custom knowledge sources, in addition to dedicated infrastructure. To catalyze research on models that condition on specific information in large textual resources, we present a benchmark for knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILT). All tasks in KILT are grounded in the same snapshot of Wikipedia, reducing engineering turnaround through the re-use of components, as well as accelerating research into task-agnostic memory architectures. We test both task-specific and general baselines, evaluating downstream performance in addition to the ability of the models to provide provenance. We find that a shared dense vector index coupled with a seq2seq model is a strong baseline, outperforming more tailor-made approaches for fact checking, open-domain question answering and dialogue, and yielding competitive results on entity linking and slot filling, by generating disambiguated text. KILT data and code are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/KILT.

To cope with the intractability of answering Conjunctive Queries (CQs) and solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs), several notions of hypergraph decompositions have been proposed -- giving rise to different notions of width, noticeably, plain, generalized, and fractional hypertree width (hw, ghw, and fhw). Given the increasing interest in using such decomposition methods in practice, a publicly accessible repository of decomposition software, as well as a large set of benchmarks, and a web-accessible workbench for inserting, analyzing, and retrieving hypergraphs are called for. We address this need by providing (i) concrete implementations of hypergraph decompositions (including new practical algorithms), (ii) a new, comprehensive benchmark of hypergraphs stemming from disparate CQ and CSP collections, and (iii) HyperBench, our new web-inter\-face for accessing the benchmark and the results of our analyses. In addition, we describe a number of actual experiments we carried out with this new infrastructure.