This installment of Research for Practice features a curated selection from Alex Ratner and Chris Ré, who provide an overview of recent developments in Knowledge Base Construction (KBC). While knowledge bases have a long history dating to the expert systems of the 1970s, recent advances in machine learning have led to a knowledge base renaissance, with knowledge bases now powering major product functionality including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Wolfram Alpha. Ratner and Re's selections highlight key considerations in the modern KBC process, from interfaces that extract knowledge from domain experts to algorithms and representations that transfer knowledge across tasks.

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods are widely used in various fields and disciplines. While most of the research has been focused on the development and improvement of new MCDA methods, relatively limited attention has been paid to their appropriate selection for the given decision problem. Their improper application decreases the quality of recommendations, as different MCDA methods deliver inconsistent results. The current paper presents a methodological and practical framework for selecting suitable MCDA methods for a particular decision situation. A set of 56 available MCDA methods was analyzed and, based on that, a hierarchical set of methods characteristics and the rule base were obtained. This analysis, rules and modelling of the uncertainty in the decision problem description allowed to build a framework supporting the selection of a MCDA method for a given decision-making situation. The practical studies indicate consistency between the methods recommended with the proposed approach and those used by the experts in reference cases. The results of the research also showed that the proposed approach can be used as a general framework for selecting an appropriate MCDA method for a given area of decision support, even in cases of data gaps in the decision-making problem description. The proposed framework was implemented within a web platform available for public use at www.mcda.it.

Knowledge bases (KBs) are paramount in NLP. We employ multiview learning for increasing accuracy and coverage of entity type information in KBs. We rely on two metaviews: language and representation. For language, we consider high-resource and low-resource languages from Wikipedia. For representation, we consider representations based on the context distribution of the entity (i.e., on its embedding), on the entity's name (i.e., on its surface form) and on its description in Wikipedia. The two metaviews language and representation can be freely combined: each pair of language and representation (e.g., German embedding, English description, Spanish name) is a distinct view. Our experiments on entity typing with fine-grained classes demonstrate the effectiveness of multiview learning. We release MVET, a large multiview - and, in particular, multilingual - entity typing dataset we created. Mono- and multilingual fine-grained entity typing systems can be evaluated on this dataset.

The chase is a fundamental tool for existential rules. Several chase variants are known, which differ on how they handle redundancies possibly caused by the introduction of nulls. Given a chase variant, the halting problem takes as input a set of existential rules and asks if this set of rules ensures the termination of the chase for any factbase. It is well-known that this problem is undecidable for all known chase variants. The related problem of boundedness asks if a given set of existential rules is bounded, i.e., whether there is a predefined upper bound on the number of (breadth-first) steps of the chase, independently from any factbase. This problem is already undecidable in the specific case of datalog rules. However, knowing that a set of rules is bounded for some chase variant does not help much in practice if the bound is unknown. Hence, in this paper, we investigate the decidability of the k-boundedness problem, which asks whether a given set of rules is bounded by an integer k. We prove that k-boundedness is decidable for three chase variants, namely the oblivious, semi-oblivious and restricted chase.

In this case, the benchmarks are for running the GoogLetNet V1 convolutional neural network framework, with a batch size of 1. (Meaning that items to be identified are sent through in serial fashion rather than batched up to be chewed on all at once.) This framework came close to beating humans at image recognition, but it took Microsoft's ResNet in 2015 to accomplish this feat, with a 3.57 percent failure rate compared to humans at 5.1 percent. The baseline for performance that Xilinx chose was the smallest F1 FPGA-accelerated instance on the EC2 compute cloud at Amazon Web Services. This instance has a single Virtex UltraScale VU9P FPGA on it, which has 1.182 million LUTs, which is attached to a server slice that has eight vCPUs (Based on the "Broadwell" Xeon E5-2696 v4 processor and 122 GB of main memory.

Abstract--We aim to predict and explain service failures in supply-chain networks, more precisely among last-mile pickup and delivery services to customers. We analyze a dataset of 500,000 services using (1) supervised classification with Random Forests, and (2) Association Rules. Our classifier reaches an average sensitivity of 0.7 and an average specificity of 0.7 for the 5 studied types of failure. Association Rules reassert the importance of confirmation calls to prevent failures due to customers not at home, show the importance of the time window size, slack time, and geographical location of the customer for the other failure types, and highlight the effect of the retailer company on several failure types. To reduce the occurrence of service failures, our data models could be coupled to optimizers, or used to define countermeasures to be taken by human dispatchers. Service failures are pervasive in supply-chain networks, with important consequences on their cost-efficiency and customer experience. We aim at predicting and explaining the cause of such failures, focusing on the last-mile pickup and delivery of items at customer locations. Such services are planned by optimizers solving some variations of the Vehicle-Routing Problem, in our case the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PDPTW [1]).

In this Book we argue that the fruitful interaction of computer vision and belief calculus is capable of stimulating significant advances in both fields. From a methodological point of view, novel theoretical results concerning the geometric and algebraic properties of belief functions as mathematical objects are illustrated and discussed in Part II, with a focus on both a perspective 'geometric approach' to uncertainty and an algebraic solution to the issue of conflicting evidence. In Part III we show how these theoretical developments arise from important computer vision problems (such as articulated object tracking, data association and object pose estimation) to which, in turn, the evidential formalism is able to provide interesting new solutions. Finally, some initial steps towards a generalization of the notion of total probability to belief functions are taken, in the perspective of endowing the theory of evidence with a complete battery of estimation and inference tools to the benefit of all scientists and practitioners.

This paper summarizes some of the technical background, research ideas, and possible development strategies for achieving machine common sense. Machine common sense has long been a critical-but-missing component of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recent advances in machine learning have resulted in new AI capabilities, but in all of these applications, machine reasoning is narrow and highly specialized. Developers must carefully train or program systems for every situation. General commonsense reasoning remains elusive. The absence of common sense prevents intelligent systems from understanding their world, behaving reasonably in unforeseen situations, communicating naturally with people, and learning from new experiences. Its absence is perhaps the most significant barrier between the narrowly focused AI applications we have today and the more general, human-like AI systems we would like to build in the future. Machine common sense remains a broad, potentially unbounded problem in AI. There are a wide range of strategies that could be employed to make progress on this difficult challenge. This paper discusses two diverse strategies for focusing development on two different machine commonsense services: (1) a service that learns from experience, like a child, to construct computational models that mimic the core domains of child cognition for objects (intuitive physics), agents (intentional actors), and places (spatial navigation); and (2) service that learns from reading the Web, like a research librarian, to construct a commonsense knowledge repository capable of answering natural language and image-based questions about commonsense phenomena.

Knowledge Base (KB) completion, which aims to determine missing relation between entities, has raised increasing attention in recent years. Most existing methods either focus on the positional relationship between entity pair and single relation (1-hop path) in semantic space or concentrate on the joint probability of Random Walks on multi-hop paths among entities. However, they do not fully consider the intrinsic relationships of all the links among entities. By observing that the single relation and multi-hop paths between the same entity pair generally contain shared/similar semantic information, this paper proposes a novel method to capture the shared features between them as the basis for inferring missing relations. To capture the shared features jointly, we develop Hierarchical Attention Networks (HANs) to automatically encode the inputs into low-dimensional vectors, and exploit two partial parameter-shared components, one for feature source discrimination and the other for determining missing relations. By joint Adversarial Training (AT) the entire model, our method minimizes the classification error of missing relations, and ensures the source of shared features are difficult to discriminate in the meantime. The AT mechanism encourages our model to extract features that are both discriminative for missing relation prediction and shareable between single relation and multi-hop paths. We extensively evaluate our method on several large-scale KBs for relation completion. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms the baseline approaches. In addition, the hierarchical attention mechanism and the feature extractor in our model can be well interpreted and utilized in the related downstream tasks.

A new software system developed by a European Union-funded research project can determine if industrial machinery requires maintenance based on the sounds it makes. A European Union-funded research project has developed software based on the human auditory system that can analyze sound to determine if industrial machinery requires maintenance. The Horizon2020 neuronSW team integrated advanced algorithms, machine learning, and big data analysis to mimic the human auditory cortex and enable early detection and prediction of mechanical breakdowns. Said SME NeuronSW Ltd.'s Jiri Cermak, "The technology leverages machine learning, the cloud, and the Internet of Things to deliver a detection service which emulates human intuition about sound." The neuronSW solution lets manufacturers perform intelligent audio diagnostics and monitor key pieces of machinery by the sounds they generate.