KMi Seminars
Information Inference Theory and Practice
This event took place on Tuesday 10 May 2005 at 14:00

 
Dr. Dawei Song KMi, The Open University, UK

In this talk, I will present a information inference framework we developed for mimicking human text based reasoning. The notion of "information inference" refers to the derivation of context sensitive implicit information carried by often short text fragments. Many of us transact information inference as part of our daily information processing tasks, e.g., when scanning subject headings of emails, or captions retrieved from search engines. Due to the information explosion, it is becoming increasingly difficult for humans to keep pace. Thus, the objective of our work is to investigate how to automatically conduct information inference in a way, which is compatible with human reasoning. In short, we aim to construct a computational reasoning system which can draw context-sensitive associations in relation to text which correlates with those we would make, but increasingly can't.

Instead of using traditional symbolic reasoning, we take a psychologistic stance. By drawing on theories from non-classical logic, information retrieval and applied cognition, we have proposed an information inference mechanism via computation of information flow through a high dimensional semantic space, which is automatically constructed from a text corpus. A concept combination heuristic has been developed for priming vector representations according to context. Information flow relationships between concepts or concept combinations are established by computing the degrees of inclusions between their underlying vector representations in the semantic space. Our framework is evaluated, using standard TREC text corpora, topics and the corresponding human relevance judgments, by measuring the effectiveness of query models derived by information flow computations. Experimental results have shown that information inference largely outperforms the co-occurrence and semantic similarity based query expansion.

From a broader point of view, information inference can be applied to many scientific and social knowledge discovery and management problems. In the end of this talk, I will discuss about a global motivation of our work and a list of on-going initiatives derived from our information inference research agenda.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.