The Linked Open Data practice has led to a significant growth of structured data on the Web in the last decade. Such structured data describe real-world entities in a machine-readable way, and have created an unprecedented opportunity for research in the field of Natural Language Processing. However, there is a lack of studies on how such data can be used, for what kind of tasks, and to what extent they can be useful for these tasks. This work focuses on the e-commerce domain to explore methods of utilising such structured data to create language resources that may be used for product classification and linking. We process billions of structured data points in the form of RDF n-quads, to create multi-million words of product-related corpora that are later used in three different ways for creating of language resources: training word embedding models, continued pre-training of BERT-like language models, and training Machine Translation models that are used as a proxy to generate product-related keywords. Our evaluation on an extensive set of benchmarks shows word embeddings to be the most reliable and consistent method to improve the accuracy on both tasks (with up to 6.9 percentage points in macro-average F1 on some datasets). The other two methods however, are not as useful. Our analysis shows that this could be due to a number of reasons, including the biased domain representation in the structured data and lack of vocabulary coverage. We share our datasets and discuss how our lessons learned could be taken forward to inform future research in this direction.

The explosion of disinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic has overloaded fact-checkers and media worldwide. To help tackle this, we developed computational methods to support COVID-19 disinformation debunking and social impacts research. This paper presents: 1) the currently largest available manually annotated COVID-19 disinformation category dataset; and 2) a classification-aware neural topic model (CANTM) that combines classification and topic modelling under a variational autoencoder framework. We demonstrate that CANTM efficiently improves classification performance with low resources, and is scalable. In addition, the classification-aware topics help researchers and end-users to better understand the classification results.

Ever-expanding volumes of biomedical text require automated semantic annotation techniques to curate and put to best use. An established field of research seeks to link mentions in text to knowledge bases such as those included in the UMLS (Unified Medical Language System), in order to enable a more sophisticated understanding. This work has yielded good results for tasks such as curating literature, but increasingly, annotation systems are more broadly applied. Medical vocabularies are expanding in size, and with them the extent of term ambiguity. Document collections are increasing in size and complexity, creating a greater need for speed and robustness. Furthermore, as the technologies are turned to new tasks, requirements change; for example greater coverage of expressions may be required in order to annotate patient records, and greater accuracy may be needed for applications that affect patients. This places new demands on the approaches currently in use. In this work, we present a new system, Bio-YODIE, and compare it to two other popular systems in order to give guidance about suitable approaches in different scenarios and how systems might be designed to accommodate future needs.