Structured and unstructured data and facts about drugs, genes, protein, viruses, and their mechanism are spread across a huge number of scientific articles. These articles are a large-scale knowledge source and can have a huge impact on disseminating knowledge about the mechanisms of certain biological processes. A knowledge graph (KG) can be constructed by integrating such facts and data and be used for data integration, exploration, and federated queries. However, exploration and querying large-scale KGs is tedious for certain groups of users due to a lack of knowledge about underlying data assets or semantic technologies. A question-answering (QA) system allows the answer of natural language questions over KGs automatically using triples contained in a KG.

When we include the unprecedented computing power offered by the cloud, it's clear we are living in an exciting era for building applications. When IBM Watson defeated the two Jeopardy champions back in 2011, it opened a new era in the practical application of Artificial Intelligence technology and contributed to the growing research and interest in this field. IBM Watson has evolved from being a game show winning question & answering computer system to a set of enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) application program interfaces (API) available on IBM Cloud. These Watson APIs can ingest, understand & analyze all forms of data, allow for natural forms of interactions with people, learn, reason – all at a scale that allows for business processes and applications to be reimagined. This course is intended for business and technical users who want to learn more about the cognitive capabilities of IBM Watson Discovery service.

This paper presents an overview of the tenth edition of the BioASQ challenge in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2022. BioASQ is an ongoing series of challenges that promotes advances in the domain of large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. In this edition, the challenge was composed of the three established tasks a, b, and Synergy, and a new task named DisTEMIST for automatic semantic annotation and grounding of diseases from clinical content in Spanish, a key concept for semantic indexing and search engines of literature and clinical records. This year, BioASQ received more than 170 distinct systems from 38 teams in total for the four different tasks of the challenge. As in previous years, the majority of the competing systems outperformed the strong baselines, indicating the continuous advancement of the state-of-the-art in this domain.

The goal of this work is to build flexible video-language models that can generalize to various video-to-text tasks from few examples, such as domain-specific captioning, question answering, and future event prediction. Existing few-shot video-language learners focus exclusively on the encoder, resulting in the absence of a video-to-text decoder to handle generative tasks. Video captioners have been pretrained on large-scale video-language datasets, but they rely heavily on finetuning and lack the ability to generate text for unseen tasks in a few-shot setting. We propose VidIL, a few-shot Video-language Learner via Image and Language models, which demonstrates strong performance on few-shot video-to-text tasks without the necessity of pretraining or finetuning on any video datasets. We use the image-language models to translate the video content into frame captions, object, attribute, and event phrases, and compose them into a temporal structure template. We then instruct a language model, with a prompt containing a few in-context examples, to generate a target output from the composed content. The flexibility of prompting allows the model to capture any form of text input, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts. Our experiments demonstrate the power of language models in understanding videos on a wide variety of video-language tasks, including video captioning, video question answering, video caption retrieval, and video future event prediction. Especially, on video future event prediction, our few-shot model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised models trained on large-scale video datasets. Code and resources are publicly available for research purposes at https://github.com/MikeWangWZHL/VidIL .

In open-retrieval conversational machine reading (OR-CMR) task, machines are required to do multi-turn question answering given dialogue history and a textual knowledge base. Existing works generally utilize two independent modules to approach this problem's two successive sub-tasks: first with a hard-label decision making and second with a question generation aided by various entailment reasoning methods. Such usual cascaded modeling is vulnerable to error propagation and prevents the two sub-tasks from being consistently optimized. In this work, we instead model OR-CMR as a unified text-to-text task in a fully end-to-end style. Experiments on the OR-ShARC dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed end-to-end framework on both sub-tasks by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Further ablation studies support that our framework can generalize to different backbone models.

Structured and unstructured data and facts about drugs, genes, protein, viruses, and their mechanism are spread across a huge number of scientific articles. These articles are a large-scale knowledge source and can have a huge impact on disseminating knowledge about the mechanisms of certain biological processes. A knowledge graph (KG) can be constructed by integrating such facts and data and be used for data integration, exploration, and federated queries. However, exploration and querying large-scale KGs is tedious for certain groups of users due to a lack of knowledge about underlying data assets or semantic technologies. A question-answering (QA) system allows the answer of natural language questions over KGs automatically using triples contained in a KG. Recently, the use and adaption of digital assistants are getting wider owing to their capability at enabling users to voice commands to control smart systems or devices. This paper is about using Amazon Alexa's voice-enabled interface for QA over KGs. As a proof-of-concept, we use the well-known DisgeNET KG, which contains knowledge covering 1.13 million gene-disease associations between 21,671 genes and 30,170 diseases, disorders, and clinical or abnormal human phenotypes. Our study shows how Alex could be of help to find facts about certain biological entities from large-scale knowledge bases.

Question Answering (QA) systems require a large amount of annotated data which is costly and time-consuming to gather. Converting datasets of existing QA benchmarks are challenging due to different formats and complexities. To address these issues, we propose an algorithm to automatically generate shorter questions resembling day-to-day human communication in the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset from longer trivia questions in Quizbowl (QB) dataset by leveraging conversion in style among the datasets. This provides an automated way to generate more data for our QA systems. To ensure quality as well as quantity of data, we detect and remove ill-formed questions using a neural classifier. We demonstrate that in a low resource setting, using the generated data improves the QA performance over the baseline system on both NQ and QB data. Our algorithm improves the scalability of training data while maintaining quality of data for QA systems.

We introduce a high-quality dataset that contains 3,397 samples comprising (i) multiple choice questions, (ii) answers (including distractors), and (iii) their source documents, from the educational domain. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and close. Correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom's taxonomy. All questions have been generated by educational experts rather than crowd workers to ensure they are maintaining educational and learning standards. Our analysis and experiments suggest distinguishable differences between our dataset and commonly used ones for question generation for educational purposes. We believe this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in the educational domain. The dataset and baselines will be released to support further research in question generation.

Charts are very popular to analyze data and convey important insights. People often analyze visualizations to answer open-ended questions that require explanatory answers. Answering such questions are often difficult and time-consuming as it requires a lot of cognitive and perceptual efforts. To address this challenge, we introduce a new task called OpenCQA, where the goal is to answer an open-ended question about a chart with descriptive texts. We present the annotation process and an in-depth analysis of our dataset. We implement and evaluate a set of baselines under three practical settings. In the first setting, a chart and the accompanying article is provided as input to the model. The second setting provides only the relevant paragraph(s) to the chart instead of the entire article, whereas the third setting requires the model to generate an answer solely based on the chart. Our analysis of the results show that the top performing models generally produce fluent and coherent text while they struggle to perform complex logical and arithmetic reasoning.

IBM yesterday announced it would be providing the AI brain for a robot being built by Airbus to accompany astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). When only the best of the best will do, it looks like Watson has the right stuff. The robot, which looks like a flying volleyball with a low-resolution face, is being deployed with German astronaut Alexander Gerst in June for a six month mission. It's called CIMON, an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, and it's headed to space to do science stuff. It'll help crew members conduct medical experiments, study crystals, and play with a Rubix cube.