AI is poised to drive the next wave of technological disruption across industries. Like previous technology revolutions in Web and mobile, however, there will be huge dividends for those organizations who can harness this technology for competitive advantage. I spend a lot of time working with customers, many of whom are investing significant time and effort in building AI applications for this very reason. From the outside, these applications couldn't be more diverse – fraud detection, retail recommendation engines, knowledge sharing – but I see a sweeping opportunity across the board: context. Without context (who the user is, what they are searching for, what similar users have searched for in the past, and how all these connections play together) these AI applications may never reach their full potential.

Real-valued word representations have transformed NLP applications; popular examples are word2vec and GloVe, recognized for their ability to capture linguistic regularities. In this paper, we demonstrate a {\em very simple}, and yet counter-intuitive, postprocessing technique -- eliminate the common mean vector and a few top dominating directions from the word vectors -- that renders off-the-shelf representations {\em even stronger}. The postprocessing is empirically validated on a variety of lexical-level intrinsic tasks (word similarity, concept categorization, word analogy) and sentence-level tasks (semantic textural similarity and { text classification}) on multiple datasets and with a variety of representation methods and hyperparameter choices in multiple languages; in each case, the processed representations are consistently better than the original ones.

To address the sparsity and cold start problem of collaborative filtering, researchers usually make use of side information, such as social networks or item attributes, to improve recommendation performance. This paper considers the knowledge graph as the source of side information. To address the limitations of existing embedding-based and path-based methods for knowledge-graph-aware recommendation, we propose Ripple Network, an end-to-end framework that naturally incorporates the knowledge graph into recommender systems. Similar to actual ripples propagating on the surface of water, Ripple Network stimulates the propagation of user preferences over the set of knowledge entities by automatically and iteratively extending a user's potential interests along links in the knowledge graph. The multiple "ripples" activated by a user's historically clicked items are thus superposed to form the preference distribution of the user with respect to a candidate item, which could be used for predicting the final clicking probability. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that Ripple Network achieves substantial gains in a variety of scenarios, including movie, book and news recommendation, over several state-of-the-art baselines.

IDO DAGAN TITLE: Open Knowledge Graphs: Consolidating and Exploring Textual Information ABSTRACT: How can we capture effectively the information expressed in multiple texts? How can we allow people, as well as computer applications, to easily explore it? The current semantic NLP pipeline typically ends at the single sentence level, putting the burden on applications to consolidate related information that is spread across different texts. Further, semantic representations are often based on non-trivial pre-specified schemata, which require expert annotation and hence complicate the creation of large scale corpora for effective training. In this talk, I will outline a proposal for a novel open representation of the information exressed jointly by multiple texts, which we term Open Knowledge Graphs (OKG). First, we follow the spirit of "open" semantic approaches, such as Open Information Extraction (OIE) and more concretely the recent Question-Answer SRL (QA-SRL) paradigm, which represent semantic structure solely via natural language expressions.

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In the modern era, abundant information is easily accessible from various sources, however only a few of these sources are reliable as they mostly contain unverified contents. We develop a system to validate the truthfulness of a given statement together with underlying evidence. The proposed system provides supporting evidence when the statement is tagged as false. Our work relies on an inference method on a knowledge graph (KG) to identify the truthfulness of statements. In order to extract the evidence of falseness, the proposed algorithm takes into account combined knowledge from KG and ontologies. The system shows very good results as it provides valid and concise evidence. The quality of KG plays a role in the performance of the inference method which explicitly affects the performance of our evidence-extracting algorithm.

Representing the semantics of words is a long-standing problem for the natural language processing community. Most methods compute word semantics given their textual context in large corpora. More recently, researchers attempted to integrate perceptual and visual features. Most of these works consider the visual appearance of objects to enhance word representations but they ignore the visual environment and context in which objects appear. We propose to unify text-based techniques with vision-based techniques by simultaneously leveraging textual and visual context to learn multimodal word embeddings. We explore various choices for what can serve as a visual context and present an end-to-end method to integrate visual context elements in a multimodal skip-gram model. We provide experiments and extensive analysis of the obtained results.

While conversing with chatbots, humans typically tend to ask many questions, a significant portion of which can be answered by referring to large-scale knowledge graphs (KG). While Question Answering (QA) and dialog systems have been studied independently, there is a need to study them closely to evaluate such real-world scenarios faced by bots involving both these tasks. Towards this end, we introduce the task of Complex Sequential QA which combines the two tasks of (i) answering factual questions through complex inferencing over a realistic-sized KG of millions of entities, and (ii) learning to converse through a series of coherently linked QA pairs. Through a labor intensive semi-automatic process, involving in-house and crowdsourced workers, we created a dataset containing around 200K dialogs with a total of 1.6M turns. Further, unlike existing large scale QA datasets which contain simple questions that can be answered from a single tuple, the questions in our dialogs require a larger subgraph of the KG. Specifically, our dataset has questions which require logical, quantitative, and comparative reasoning as well as their combinations. This calls for models which can: (i) parse complex natural language questions, (ii) use conversation context to resolve coreferences and ellipsis in utterances, (iii) ask for clarifications for ambiguous queries, and finally (iv) retrieve relevant subgraphs of the KG to answer such questions. However, our experiments with a combination of state of the art dialog and QA models show that they clearly do not achieve the above objectives and are inadequate for dealing with such complex real world settings. We believe that this new dataset coupled with the limitations of existing models as reported in this paper should encourage further research in Complex Sequential QA.

Knowledge graph (KG) is known to be helpful for the task of question answering (QA), since it provides well-structured relational information between entities, and allows one to further infer indirect facts. However, it is challenging to build QA systems which can learn to reason over knowledge graphs based on question-answer pairs alone. First, when people ask questions, their expressions are noisy (for example, typos in texts, or variations in pronunciations), which is non-trivial for the QA system to match those mentioned entities to the knowledge graph. Second, many questions require multi-hop logic reasoning over the knowledge graph to retrieve the answers. To address these challenges, we propose a novel and unified deep learning architecture, and an end-to-end variational learning algorithm which can handle noise in questions, and learn multi-hop reasoning simultaneously. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a recent benchmark dataset in the literature. We also derive a series of new benchmark datasets, including questions for multi-hop reasoning, questions paraphrased by neural translation model, and questions in human voice. Our method yields very promising results on all these challenging datasets.

Pre-trained distributed word representations have been proven to be useful in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the geometric basis of word representations and their relations to the representations of word's contexts has not been carefully studied yet. In this study, we first investigate such geometric relationship under a general framework, which is abstracted from some typical word representation learning approaches, and find out that only the directions of word representations are well associated to their context vector representations while the magnitudes are not. In order to make better use of the information contained in the magnitudes of word representations, we propose a hierarchical Gaussian model combined with maximum a posteriori estimation to learn word representations, and extend it to represent polysemous words. Our word representations have been evaluated on multiple NLP tasks, and the experimental results show that the proposed model achieved promising results, comparing to several popular word representations.