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KMi Seminars
Wisdom of Crowds vs. Wisdom of Linguists
This event took place on Wednesday 08 December 2010 at 11:30

 
Dr. Torsten Zesch Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing lab, TU Darmstadt, Germany

Computing the semantic relatedness between words is a pervasive task in natural language processing. So far, insufficient coverage of linguistic knowledge resources has been a major impediment for using semantic relatedness measures in large-scale applications. Recently, rapidly growing collaboratively constructed resources like Wikipedia and Wiktionary have been discovered as a new kind of semantic resource.

In the talk, I will shortly introduce these new resources and show how existing semantic relatedness measures can be adapted to the new resources. I will then compare the performance of traditional resources (Wisdom of Linguists) with that of the new resources (Wisdom of Crowds), and show under which conditions collaboratively constructed semantic resources can be used as a proxy for linguistically constructed semantic resources.

Additionally, I will introduce freely available application programming interfaces to Wikipedia and Wiktionary that have been used to conduct the experiments described in my talk.

 
KMi Seminars
 

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.