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Tech Report kmi-04-30 Abstract


Adaptive Named Entity Recognition for Social Network Analysis and Domain Ontology Maintenance
Techreport ID: kmi-04-30
Date: 2004
Author(s): Jianhan Zhu, Alexandre L. Goncalves, Victoria Uren
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We present a system which unearths relationships between named entities from information in Web pages. We use an adaptive named entity recognition system, ESpotter, which recognizes entities of various types with high precision and recall from various domains on the Web, to generate entity data such as peoples' names. Given an entity, we apply a link analysis algorithm to the entity data for finding other entities which are closely related to it. We present our results to people whose names had been included for them to assess our findings. User feedback is analyzed by a statistical method. The results can be used to maintatin a domain ontology. Our experiments on the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) domain show that our system can accurately find entities such as organizations, people, projects, and research areas which are closely related to people working in KMi, and the results conform with the existing knowledge in our ontology and suggest new knowledge which can be used to update the ontology.
 
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Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.