Ontologies
Building Intelligent Databases through Similarity: Interaction of Logical and Qualitative Reasoning
In this article, we present a novel method for assessing the similarity of information within knowledge-bases using a logical point of view. This proposal introduces the concept of a similarity property space $\Xi$P for each knowledge K, offering a nuanced approach to understanding and quantifying similarity. By defining the similarity knowledge space $\Xi$K through its properties and incorporating similarity source information, the framework reinforces the idea that similarity is deeply rooted in the characteristics of the knowledge being compared. Inclusion of super-categories within the similarity knowledge space $\Xi$K allows for a hierarchical organization of knowledge, facilitating more sophisticated analysis and comparison. On the one hand, it provides a structured framework for organizing and understanding similarity. The existence of super-categories within this space further allows for hierarchical organization of knowledge, which can be particularly useful in complex domains. On the other hand, the finite nature of these categories might be restrictive in certain contexts, especially when dealing with evolving or highly nuanced forms of knowledge. Future research and applications of this framework focus on addressing its potential limitations, particularly in handling dynamic and highly specialized knowledge domains.
Computational Law: Datasets, Benchmarks, and Ontologies
There is a surge observed in research and applications of computer science and artificial intelligence in the legal domain. The related term computational law is commonly defined as "the branch of Legal Informatics concerned with the representation of rule and regulations in computable form" [Genesereth and Chaudhri, 2022]. The focus of an important percentage of related work on computational law is on automatic processing, generation, or understanding of legal documents [Küçük and Can, 2024]. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), such as generative AI models, pre-trained language models (PLMs) or large language models (LLMs), and chatbots developed using such models, have also affected the domain of computational law, and this dramatic impact is also acknowledged by legal professionals [Goth, 2024]. Undoubtedly, annotated or unannotated datasets and benchmarks in digital form are required for legal AI studies on legal texts, in order to facilitate model training, and to ensure sound comparisons of different approaches to the problems pertaining to computational law.
Lawful and Accountable Personal Data Processing with GDPR-based Access and Usage Control in Distributed Systems
van Binsbergen, L. Thomas, Steketee, Marten C., Kebede, Milen G., Janssen, Heleen L., van Engers, Tom M.
Compliance with the GDPR privacy regulation places a significant burden on organisations regarding the handling of personal data. The perceived efforts and risks of complying with the GDPR further increase when data processing activities span across organisational boundaries, as is the case in both small-scale data sharing settings and in large-scale international data spaces. This paper addresses these concerns by proposing a case-generic method for automated normative reasoning that establishes legal arguments for the lawfulness of data processing activities. The arguments are established on the basis of case-specific legal qualifications made by privacy experts, bringing the human in the loop. The obtained expert system promotes transparency and accountability, remains adaptable to extended or altered interpretations of the GDPR, and integrates into novel or existing distributed data processing systems. This result is achieved by defining a formal ontology and semantics for automated normative reasoning based on an analysis of the purpose-limitation principle of the GDPR. The ontology and semantics are implemented in eFLINT, a domain-specific language for specifying and reasoning with norms. The XACML architecture standard, applicable to both access and usage control, is extended, demonstrating how GDPR-based normative reasoning can integrate into (existing, distributed) systems for data processing. The resulting system is designed and critically assessed in reference to requirements extracted from the GPDR.
Ontology Generation using Large Language Models
Lippolis, Anna Sofia, Saeedizade, Mohammad Javad, Keskisärkkä, Robin, Zuppiroli, Sara, Ceriani, Miguel, Gangemi, Aldo, Blomqvist, Eva, Nuzzolese, Andrea Giovanni
The ontology engineering process is complex, time-consuming, and error-prone, even for experienced ontology engineers. In this work, we investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide effective OWL ontology drafts directly from ontological requirements described using user stories and competency questions. Our main contribution is the presentation and evaluation of two new prompting techniques for automated ontology development: Memoryless CQbyCQ and Ontogenia. We also emphasize the importance of three structural criteria for ontology assessment, alongside expert qualitative evaluation, highlighting the need for a multi-dimensional evaluation in order to capture the quality and usability of the generated ontologies. Our experiments, conducted on a benchmark dataset of ten ontologies with 100 distinct CQs and 29 different user stories, compare the performance of three LLMs using the two prompting techniques. The results demonstrate improvements over the current state-of-the-art in LLM-supported ontology engineering. More specifically, the model OpenAI o1-preview with Ontogenia produces ontologies of sufficient quality to meet the requirements of ontology engineers, significantly outperforming novice ontology engineers in modelling ability. However, we still note some common mistakes and variability of result quality, which is important to take into account when using LLMs for ontology authoring support. We discuss these limitations and propose directions for future research.
Improving Hate Speech Classification with Cross-Taxonomy Dataset Integration
Algorithmic hate speech detection faces significant challenges due to the diverse definitions and datasets used in research and practice. Social media platforms, legal frameworks, and institutions each apply distinct yet overlapping definitions, complicating classification efforts. This study addresses these challenges by demonstrating that existing datasets and taxonomies can be integrated into a unified model, enhancing prediction performance and reducing reliance on multiple specialized classifiers. The work introduces a universal taxonomy and a hate speech classifier capable of detecting a wide range of definitions within a single framework. Our approach is validated by combining two widely used but differently annotated datasets, showing improved classification performance on an independent test set. This work highlights the potential of dataset and taxonomy integration in advancing hate speech detection, increasing efficiency, and ensuring broader applicability across contexts.
Towards Resilient and Sustainable Global Industrial Systems: An Evolutionary-Based Approach
Jirkovský, Václav, Kubalík, Jiří, Kadera, Petr, Schirrmann, Arnd, Mitschke, Andreas, Zindel, Andreas
This paper presents a new complex optimization problem in the field of automatic design of advanced industrial systems and proposes a hybrid optimization approach to solve the problem. The problem is multi-objective as it aims at finding solutions that minimize CO2 emissions, transportation time, and costs. The optimization approach combines an evolutionary algorithm and classical mathematical programming to design resilient and sustainable global manufacturing networks. Further, it makes use of the OWL ontology for data consistency and constraint management. The experimental validation demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach in both single and double sourcing scenarios. The proposed methodology, in general, can be applied to any industry case with complex manufacturing and supply chain challenges.
A Conceptual Model for Attributions in Event-Centric Knowledge Graphs
Plötzky, Florian, Britz, Katarina, Balke, Wolf-Tilo
The use of narratives as a means of fusing information from knowledge graphs (KGs) into a coherent line of argumentation has been the subject of recent investigation. Narratives are especially useful in event-centric knowledge graphs in that they provide a means to connect different real-world events and categorize them by well-known narrations. However, specifically for controversial events, a problem in information fusion arises, namely, multiple viewpoints regarding the validity of certain event aspects, e.g., regarding the role a participant takes in an event, may exist. Expressing those viewpoints in KGs is challenging because disputed information provided by different viewpoints may introduce inconsistencies. Hence, most KGs only feature a single view on the contained information, hampering the effectiveness of narrative information access. This paper is an extension of our original work and introduces attributions, i.e., parameterized predicates that allow for the representation of facts that are only valid in a specific viewpoint. For this, we develop a conceptual model that allows for the representation of viewpoint-dependent information. As an extension, we enhance the model by a conception of viewpoint-compatibility. Based on this, we deepen our original deliberations on the model's effects on information fusion and provide additional grounding in the literature.
How Metacognitive Architectures Remember Their Own Thoughts: A Systematic Review
Nolte, Robin, Pomarlan, Mihai, Janssen, Ayden, Beßler, Daniel, Javanmardi, Kamyar, Jongebloed, Sascha, Porzel, Robert, Bateman, John, Beetz, Michael, Malaka, Rainer
Inspired by human cognition, metacognition has gained significant attention for its potential to enhance autonomy, adaptability, and robust learning in artificial agents. Yet research on Computational Metacognitive Architectures (CMAs) remains fragmented: diverse theories, terminologies, and design choices have led to disjointed developments and limited comparability across systems. Existing overviews and surveys often remain at a broad, conceptual level, making it difficult to synthesize deeper insights into the underlying algorithms and representations, and their respective success. We address this gap by performing an explorative systematic review of how CMAs model, store, remember and process their metacognitive experiences, one of Flavell's (1979) three foundational components of metacognition. Following this organizing principle, we identify 35 CMAs that feature episodic introspective data ranging from symbolic event traces to sub-symbolic arousal metrics. We consider different aspects - ranging from the underlying psychological theories to the content and structure of collected data, to the algorithms used and evaluation results - and derive a unifying perspective that allows us to compare in depth how different Computational Metacognitive Architectures (CMAs) leverage metacognitive experiences for tasks such as error diagnosis, self-repair, and goal-driven learning. Our findings highlight both the promise of metacognitive experiences - in boosting adaptability, explainability, and overall system performance - and the persistent lack of shared standards or evaluation benchmarks.
Predicting clinical outcomes from patient care pathways represented with temporal knowledge graphs
Jhee, Jong Ho, Megina, Alberto, Beaufils, Pacôme Constant Dit, Karakachoff, Matilde, Redon, Richard, Gaignard, Alban, Coulet, Adrien
Background: With the increasing availability of healthcare data, predictive modeling finds many applications in the biomedical domain, such as the evaluation of the level of risk for various conditions, which in turn can guide clinical decision making. However, it is unclear how knowledge graph data representations and their embedding, which are competitive in some settings, could be of interest in biomedical predictive modeling. Method: We simulated synthetic but realistic data of patients with intracranial aneurysm and experimented on the task of predicting their clinical outcome. We compared the performance of various classification approaches on tabular data versus a graph-based representation of the same data. Next, we investigated how the adopted schema for representing first individual data and second temporal data impacts predictive performances. Results: Our study illustrates that in our case, a graph representation and Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) embeddings reach the best performance for a predictive task from observational data. We emphasize the importance of the adopted schema and of the consideration of literal values in the representation of individual data.
Building Knowledge Graphs Towards a Global Food Systems Datahub
Gelal, Nirmal, Gautam, Aastha, Norouzi, Sanaz Saki, Giordano, Nico, Silva, Claudio Dias da Jr, Francois, Jean Ribert, Onofre, Kelsey Andersen, Nelson, Katherine, Hutchinson, Stacy, Lin, Xiaomao, Welch, Stephen, Lollato, Romulo, Hitzler, Pascal, McGinty, Hande Küçük
Sustainable agricultural production aligns with several sustainability goals established by the United Nations (UN). However, there is a lack of studies that comprehensively examine sustainable agricultural practices across various products and production methods. Such research could provide valuable insights into the diverse factors influencing the sustainability of specific crops and produce while also identifying practices and conditions that are universally applicable to all forms of agricultural production. While this research might help us better understand sustainability, the community would still need a consistent set of vocabularies. These consistent vocabularies, which represent the underlying datasets, can then be stored in a global food systems datahub. The standardized vocabularies might help encode important information for further statistical analyses and AI/ML approaches in the datasets, resulting in the research targeting sustainable agricultural production. A structured method of representing information in sustainability, especially for wheat production, is currently unavailable. In an attempt to address this gap, we are building a set of ontologies and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) that encode knowledge associated with sustainable wheat production using formal logic. The data for this set of knowledge graphs are collected from public data sources, experimental results collected at our experiments at Kansas State University, and a Sustainability Workshop that we organized earlier in the year, which helped us collect input from different stakeholders throughout the value chain of wheat. The modeling of the ontology (i.e., the schema) for the Knowledge Graph has been in progress with the help of our domain experts, following a modular structure using KNARM methodology. In this paper, we will present our preliminary results and schemas of our Knowledge Graph and ontologies.