Question answering over RDF data like knowledge graphs has been greatly advanced, with a number of good systems providing crisp answers for natural language questions or telegraphic queries. Some of these systems incorporate textual sources as additional evidence for the answering process, but cannot compute answers that are present in text alone. Conversely, the IR and NLP communities have addressed QA over text, but such systems barely utilize semantic data and knowledge. This paper presents a method for complex questions that can seamlessly operate over a mixture of RDF datasets and text corpora, or individual sources, in a unified framework. Our method, called UNIQORN, builds a context graph on-the-fly, by retrieving question-relevant evidences from the RDF data and/or a text corpus, using fine-tuned BERT models. The resulting graph typically contains all question-relevant evidences but also a lot of noise. UNIQORN copes with this input by a graph algorithm for Group Steiner Trees, that identifies the best answer candidates in the context graph. Experimental results on several benchmarks of complex questions with multiple entities and relations, show that UNIQORN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for heterogeneous QA -- in a full training mode, as well as in zero-shot settings. The graph-based methodology provides user-interpretable evidence for the complete answering process.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are a popular way to organise information based on ontologies or schemas and have been used across a variety of scenarios from search to recommendation. Despite advances in KGs, representing knowledge remains a non-trivial task across industries and it is especially challenging in the biomedical and healthcare domains due to complex interdependent relations between entities, heterogeneity, lack of standardization, and sparseness of data. KGs are used to discover diagnoses or prioritize genes relevant to disease, but they often rely on schemas that are not centred around a node or entity of interest, such as a person. Entity-centric KGs are relatively unexplored but hold promise in representing important facets connected to a central node and unlocking downstream tasks beyond graph traversal and reasoning, such as generating graph embeddings and training graph neural networks for a wide range of predictive tasks. This paper presents an end-to-end representation learning framework to extract entity-centric KGs from structured and unstructured data. We introduce a star-shaped ontology to represent the multiple facets of a person and use it to guide KG creation. Compact representations of the graphs are created leveraging graph neural networks and experiments are conducted using different levels of heterogeneity or explicitness. A readmission prediction task is used to evaluate the results of the proposed framework, showing a stable system, robust to missing data, that outperforms a range of baseline machine learning classifiers. We highlight that this approach has several potential applications across domains and is open-sourced. Lastly, we discuss lessons learned, challenges, and next steps for the adoption of the framework in practice.

Generating code from a natural language using Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, seems groundbreaking. Yet, with more extensive use, it's evident that this approach has its own limitations. The inherent ambiguity of natural language presents challenges for complex software designs. Accordingly, our research offers an Agile Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach that enhances code auto-generation using OpenAI's GPT-4. Our work emphasizes "Agility" as a significant contribution to the current MDD method, particularly when the model undergoes changes or needs deployment in a different programming language. Thus, we present a case-study showcasing a multi-agent simulation system of an Unmanned Vehicle Fleet. In the first and second layer of our approach, we constructed a textual representation of the case-study using Unified Model Language (UML) diagrams. In the next layer, we introduced two sets of constraints that minimize model ambiguity. Object Constraints Language (OCL) is applied to fine-tune the code constructions details, while FIPA ontology is used to shape communication semantics and protocols. Ultimately, leveraging GPT-4, our last layer auto-generates code in both Java and Python. The Java code is deployed within the JADE framework, while the Python code is deployed in PADE framework. Concluding our research, we engaged in a comprehensive evaluation of the generated code. From a behavioural standpoint, the auto-generated code aligned perfectly with the expected UML sequence diagram. Structurally, we compared the complexity of code derived from UML diagrams constrained solely by OCL to that influenced by both OCL and FIPA-ontology. Results indicate that ontology-constrained model produce inherently more intricate code, but it remains manageable and low-risk for further testing and maintenance.

Ontology matching (OM) entails the identification of semantic relationships between concepts within two or more knowledge graphs (KGs) and serves as a critical step in integrating KGs from various sources. Recent advancements in deep OM models have harnessed the power of transformer-based language models and the advantages of knowledge graph embedding. Nevertheless, these OM models still face persistent challenges, such as a lack of reference alignments, runtime latency, and unexplored different graph structures within an end-to-end framework. In this study, we introduce a novel self-supervised learning OM framework with input ontologies, called LaKERMap. This framework capitalizes on the contextual and structural information of concepts by integrating implicit knowledge into transformers. Specifically, we aim to capture multiple structural contexts, encompassing both local and global interactions, by employing distinct training objectives. To assess our methods, we utilize the Bio-ML datasets and tasks. The findings from our innovative approach reveal that LaKERMap surpasses state-of-the-art systems in terms of alignment quality and inference time. Our models and codes are available here: https://github.com/ellenzhuwang/lakermap.

Published biomedical information has and continues to rapidly increase. The recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), have generated considerable interest in automating the extraction, normalization, and representation of biomedical knowledge about entities such as genes and diseases. Our study analyzes germline abstracts in the construction of knowledge graphs of the of the immense work that has been done in this area for genes and diseases. This paper presents SimpleGermKG, an automatic knowledge graph construction approach that connects germline genes and diseases. For the extraction of genes and diseases, we employ BioBERT, a pre-trained BERT model on biomedical corpora. We propose an ontology-based and rule-based algorithm to standardize and disambiguate medical terms. For semantic relationships between articles, genes, and diseases, we implemented a part-whole relation approach to connect each entity with its data source and visualize them in a graph-based knowledge representation. Lastly, we discuss the knowledge graph applications, limitations, and challenges to inspire the future research of germline corpora. Our knowledge graph contains 297 genes, 130 diseases, and 46,747 triples. Graph-based visualizations are used to show the results.

We aim at development white-box machine learning algorithms. We focus here on algorithms for learning axioms in description logic. We extend the Class Expression Learning for Ontology Engineering (CELOE) algorithm contained in the DL-Learner tool. The approach uses multiple search trees and a shared pool of refinements in order to split the search space in smaller subspaces. We introduce the conjunction operation of best class expressions from each tree, keeping the results which give the most information. The aim is to foster exploration from a diverse set of starting classes and to streamline the process of finding class expressions in ontologies. The current implementation and settings indicated that the Forest Mixing approach did not outperform the traditional CELOE. Despite these results, the conceptual proposal brought forward by this approach may stimulate future improvements in class expression finding in ontologies.

Wikipedia articles are hierarchically organized through categories and lists, providing one of the most comprehensive and universal taxonomy, but its open creation is causing redundancies and inconsistencies. Assigning DBPedia classes to Wikipedia categories and lists can alleviate the problem, realizing a large knowledge graph which is essential for categorizing digital contents through entity linking and typing. However, the existing approach of CaLiGraph is producing incomplete and non-fine grained mappings. In this paper, we tackle the problem as ontology alignment, where structural information of knowledge graphs and lexical and semantic features of ontology class names are utilized to discover confident mappings, which are in turn utilized for finetuing pretrained language models in a distant supervision fashion. Our method SLHCat consists of two main parts: 1) Automatically generating training data by leveraging knowledge graph structure, semantic similarities, and named entity typing. 2) Finetuning and prompt-tuning of the pre-trained language model BERT are carried out over the training data, to capture semantic and syntactic properties of class names. Our model SLHCat is evaluated over a benchmark dataset constructed by annotating 3000 fine-grained CaLiGraph-DBpedia mapping pairs. SLHCat is outperforming the baseline model by a large margin of 25% in accuracy, offering a practical solution for large-scale ontology mapping.

This paper describes a repository for ontologies of astronomy, astronautics, and other space-related topics. It may be called AstroPortal (or SpacePortal), AstroHub (or SpaceHub), etc. The creation of this repository will be applicable to academic, research and other data-intensive sectors. It is relevant for space sciences (including astronomy), Earth science, and astronautics (spaceflight), among other data-intensive disciplines. The repository should provide a centralized platform to search, review and create ontologies for astro-related topics. It thereby can decrease research time, while also providing a user-friendly means to study and compare knowledge organization systems or semantic resources of the target domains. With no apparent repository available on the target domain, this paper also expresses a novel concept.

The Collaborative Research Center for Everyday Activity Science & Engineering (CRC EASE) aims to enable robots to perform environmental interaction tasks with close to human capacity. It therefore employs a shared ontology to model the activity of both kinds of agents, empowering robots to learn from human experiences. To properly describe these human experiences, the ontology will strongly benefit from incorporating characteristics of neuronal information processing which are not accessible from a behavioral perspective alone. We, therefore, propose the analysis of human neuroimaging data for evaluation and validation of concepts and events defined in the ontology model underlying most of the CRC projects. In an exploratory analysis, we employed an Independent Component Analysis (ICA) on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data from participants who were presented with the same complex video stimuli of activities as robotic and human agents in different environments and contexts. We then correlated the activity patterns of brain networks represented by derived components with timings of annotated event categories as defined by the ontology model. The present results demonstrate a subset of common networks with stable correlations and specificity towards particular event classes and groups, associated with environmental and contextual factors. These neuronal characteristics will open up avenues for adapting the ontology model to be more consistent with human information processing.

OTTR is a language for representing ontology modeling patterns, which enables to build ontologies or knowledge bases by instantiating templates. Thereby, particularities of the ontological representation language are hidden from the domain experts, and it enables ontology engineers to, to some extent, separate the processes of deciding about what information to model from deciding about how to model the information, e.g., which design patterns to use. Certain decisions can thus be postponed for the benefit of focusing on one of these processes. To date, only few works on ontology engineering where ontology templates are applied are described in the literature. In this paper, we outline our methodology and report findings from our ontology engineering activities in the domain of Material Science. In these activities, OTTR templates play a key role. Our ontology engineering process is bottom-up, as we begin modeling activities from existing data that is then, via templates, fed into a knowledge graph, and it is top-down, as we first focus on which data to model and postpone the decision of how to model the data. We find, among other things, that OTTR templates are especially useful as a means of communication with domain experts. Furthermore, we find that because OTTR templates encapsulate modeling decisions, the engineering process becomes flexible, meaning that design decisions can be changed at little cost.