Representing snippets of information abstractly is a task that needs to be performed for various purposes, such as database view specification and the first stage in the natural language generation pipeline for generative AI from structured input, i.e., the content selection stage to determine what needs to be verbalised. For the Abstract Wikipedia project, requirements analysis revealed that such an abstract representation requires multilingual modelling, content selection covering declarative content and functions, and both classes and instances. There is no modelling language that meets either of the three features, let alone a combination. Following a rigorous language design process inclusive of broad stakeholder consultation, we created CoSMo, a novel {\sc Co}ntent {\sc S}election {\sc Mo}deling language that meets these and other requirements so that it may be useful both in Abstract Wikipedia as well as other contexts. We describe the design process, rationale and choices, the specification, and preliminary evaluation of the language.

The Polkadot ecosystem is a disruptive and highly complex multi-chain architecture that poses challenges in terms of data analysis and communicability. Currently, there is a lack of standardized and holistic approaches to retrieve and analyze data across parachains and applications, making it difficult for general users and developers to access ecosystem data consistently. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that includes a domain ontology called POnto (a Polkadot Ontology) to address these challenges. POnto provides a structured representation of the ecosystem's concepts and relationships, enabling a formal understanding of the platform. The proposed knowledge-oriented approach enhances integration and communicability, enabling a wider range of users to participate in the ecosystem and facilitating the development of AI-based applications. The paper presents a case study methodology to validate the proposed framework, which includes expert feedback and insights from the Polkadot community. The POnto ontology and the roadmap for a query engine based on a Controlled Natural Language using the ontology, provide valuable contributions to the growth and adoption of the Polkadot ecosystem in heterogeneous socio-technical environments.

We tackle the task of enriching ontologies by automatically translating natural language sentences into Description Logic. Since Large Language Models (LLMs) are the best tools for translations, we fine-tuned a GPT-3 model to convert Natural Language sentences into OWL Functional Syntax. We employ objective and concise examples to fine-tune the model regarding: instances, class subsumption, domain and range of relations, object properties relationships, disjoint classes, complements, cardinality restrictions. The resulted axioms are used to enrich an ontology, in a human supervised manner. The developed tool is publicly provided as a Protge plugin.

Generative AI, the most popular current approach to AI, consists of large language models (LLMs) that are trained to produce outputs that are plausible, but not necessarily correct. Although their abilities are often uncanny, they are lacking in aspects of reasoning, leading LLMs to be less than completely trustworthy. Furthermore, their results tend to be both unpredictable and uninterpretable. We lay out 16 desiderata for future AI, and discuss an alternative approach to AI which could theoretically address many of the limitations associated with current approaches: AI educated with curated pieces of explicit knowledge and rules of thumb, enabling an inference engine to automatically deduce the logical entailments of all that knowledge. Even long arguments produced this way can be both trustworthy and interpretable, since the full step-by-step line of reasoning is always available, and for each step the provenance of the knowledge used can be documented and audited. There is however a catch: if the logical language is expressive enough to fully represent the meaning of anything we can say in English, then the inference engine runs much too slowly. That's why symbolic AI systems typically settle for some fast but much less expressive logic, such as knowledge graphs. We describe how one AI system, Cyc, has developed ways to overcome that tradeoff and is able to reason in higher order logic in real time. We suggest that any trustworthy general AI will need to hybridize the approaches, the LLM approach and more formal approach, and lay out a path to realizing that dream.

The Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) was developed to describe bibliographic concepts and metadata and is maintained by the Library of Congress. Its authoritative version is given as an XML schema based on an XML mindset which means that it has significant limitations for use in a knowledge graphs context. We have therefore developed the Modular MODS Ontology (MMODS-O) which incorporates all elements and attributes of the MODS XML schema. In designing the ontology, we adopt the recent Modular Ontology Design Methodology (MOMo) with the intention to strike a balance between modularity and quality ontology design on the one hand, and conservative backward compatibility with MODS on the other.

Digital media have enabled the access to unprecedented literary knowledge. Authors, readers, and scholars are now able to discover and share an increasing amount of information about books and their authors. However, these sources of knowledge are fragmented and do not adequately represent non-Western writers and their works. In this paper we present The World Literature Knowledge Graph, a semantic resource containing 194,346 writers and 965,210 works, specifically designed for exploring facts about literary works and authors from different parts of the world. The knowledge graph integrates information about the reception of literary works gathered from 3 different communities of readers, aligned according to a single semantic model. The resource is accessible through an online visualization platform, which can be found at the following URL: https://literaturegraph.di.unito.it/. This platform has been rigorously tested and validated by $3$ distinct categories of experts who have found it to be highly beneficial for their respective work domains. These categories include teachers, researchers in the humanities, and professionals in the publishing industry. The feedback received from these experts confirms that they can effectively utilize the platform to enhance their work processes and achieve valuable outcomes.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to be embodied in software agents, robots, and cyber-physical systems that can understand the various contextual information of daily life in the home environment to support human behavior and decision making in various situations. Scene graph and knowledge graph (KG) construction technologies have attracted much attention for knowledge-based embodied question answering meeting this expectation. However, collecting and managing real data on daily activities under various experimental conditions in a physical space are quite costly, and developing AI that understands the intentions and contexts is difficult. In the future, data from both virtual spaces, where conditions can be easily modified, and physical spaces, where conditions are difficult to change, are expected to be combined to analyze daily living activities. However, studies on the KG construction of daily activities using virtual space and their application have yet to progress. The potential and challenges must still be clarified to facilitate AI development for human daily life. Thus, this study proposes the VirtualHome2KG framework to generate synthetic KGs of daily life activities in virtual space. This framework augments both the synthetic video data of daily activities and the contextual semantic data corresponding to the video contents based on the proposed event-centric schema and virtual space simulation results. Therefore, context-aware data can be analyzed, and various applications that have conventionally been difficult to develop due to the insufficient availability of relevant data and semantic information can be developed. We also demonstrate herein the utility and potential of the proposed VirtualHome2KG framework through several use cases, including the analysis of daily activities by querying, embedding, and clustering, and fall risk detection among ...

This thesis work falls within the framework of question answering (QA) in the biomedical domain where several specific challenges are addressed, such as specialized lexicons and terminologies, the types of treated questions, and the characteristics of targeted documents. We are particularly interested in studying and improving methods that aim at finding accurate and short answers to biomedical natural language questions from a large scale of biomedical textual documents in English. QA aims at providing inquirers with direct, short and precise answers to their natural language questions. In this Ph.D. thesis, we propose four contributions to improve the performance of QA in the biomedical domain. In our first contribution, we propose a machine learning-based method for question type classification to determine the types of given questions which enable to a biomedical QA system to use the appropriate answer extraction method. We also propose an another machine learning-based method to assign one or more topics (e.g., pharmacological, test, treatment, etc.) to given questions in order to determine the semantic types of the expected answers which are very useful in generating specific answer retrieval strategies. In the second contribution, we first propose a document retrieval method to retrieve a set of relevant documents that are likely to contain the answers to biomedical questions from the MEDLINE database. We then present a passage retrieval method to retrieve a set of relevant passages to questions. In the third contribution, we propose specific answer extraction methods to generate both exact and ideal answers. Finally, in the fourth contribution, we develop a fully automated semantic biomedical QA system called SemBioNLQA which is able to deal with a variety of natural language questions and to generate appropriate answers by providing both exact and ideal answers.

Ontologies are known for their ability to organize rich metadata, support the identification of novel insights via semantic queries, and promote reuse. In this paper, we consider the problem of automated planning, where the objective is to find a sequence of actions that will move an agent from an initial state of the world to a desired goal state. We hypothesize that given a large number of available planners and diverse planning domains; they carry essential information that can be leveraged to identify suitable planners and improve their performance for a domain. We use data on planning domains and planners from the International Planning Competition (IPC) to construct a planning ontology and demonstrate via experiments in two use cases that the ontology can lead to the selection of promising planners and improving their performance using macros - a form of action ordering constraints extracted from planning ontology. We also make the planning ontology and associated resources available to the community to promote further research.

Entity Resolution (ER) is the problem of determining when two entities refer to the same underlying entity. The problem has been studied for over 50 years, and most recently, has taken on new importance in an era of large, heterogeneous 'knowledge graphs' published on the Web and used widely in domains as wide ranging as social media, e-commerce and search. This chapter will discuss the specific problem of named ER in the context of personal knowledge graphs (PKGs). We begin with a formal definition of the problem, and the components necessary for doing high-quality and efficient ER. We also discuss some challenges that are expected to arise for Web-scale data. Next, we provide a brief literature review, with a special focus on how existing techniques can potentially apply to PKGs. We conclude the chapter by covering some applications, as well as promising directions for future research.