Carolina Gallardo

The UNL initiative: an overview

We present here a description of the UNL initiative based on the Universal Networking Language (UNL). This language was conceived to support multilingual communication on the Internet across linguistic barriers. This initiative was launched by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University in 1996. The initial consortium was formed to support 15 languages. Eight years later, this initial consortium changed, many components and resources were developed, and the UNL language itself evolved to support different types of applications, from multilingual generation to “knowledge repositories” or cross- lingual information retrieval applications. We describe the main features of this UNL Language, making a comparison with some similar approaches, such as interlinguas. We also describe some organizational and managerial aspects of the UNL according to criteria of quality and maturity, placing emphasis on the fact that the initiative is open to any interested group or researcher.

Arguments That Support Decisions in e-Cognocracy: A Qualitative Approach Based on Text Mining Techniques

E-cognocracy [1-5] is a new democratic system that tries to adequate democracy to needs and challenges of Knowledge Society. This is a cognitive democracy oriented to the extraction and democratization of the knowledge related with the scientific resolution of public decision making problems associated with the governance of society. It is based [3,6] on the evolutionism of live systems and it can be understood as the government of the knowledge and wisdom by means of the information and communication technology (ICT). E-cognocracy combines the representative and the participative democracies by aggregating the preferences of the political parties with those of citizens and by generating knowledge from the conjoint discussion of the arguments that support their own positions. This paper presents a qualitative approach based in text mining tools to identify these arguments from the analysis of the messages and comments elicited by political parties and citizens through a collaborative tool (forum). The proposed methodology has been applied to a case study developed with students of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Zaragoza and related with the potential location at the region of Aragon (Spain), of the greatest leisure project in Europe (Gran Scala).

Interlingual Information Extraction as a Solution for Multilingual QA Systems

Information extraction systems have been dealt with at length from the viewpoint of users posing definite questions whose expected answer is to be found in a document collection. This has been tackled by means of systems that analyse the user query and try to use the grammar features of each language to find a possible answer. This approach has failed to work for users of other languages or for documents in different languages, save for a few languages for which the query can be machine translated to the target language or all languages. Where there are more languages, however, this approach is impracticable for information extraction in a reasonable time. The massively multilingual approach (> 6 languages) necessarily involves the language-independent representation of the contents, that is, using an interlingua. This paper reports a promising early trial of a method that launches a query in any language against a language-independent representation of the document set using a general-purpose UNL interlingua and receives a precise response.

A new e-learning tool for cognitive democracies in the Knowledge Society

Cognitive democracies can be defined as new models of e-democracy that are based on the evolutionism of living systems and deal with their vital (cognitive) process by means of the continuous education of citizens with regards to one of the essential characteristics of humankind: decision making. The education is provided by the social democratisation of the knowledge. This corresponds to the proportion of the arguments that support the positions. These arguments are extracted from the opinions expressed in the discussion stages included in the e-democracy models. (Moreno-Jimenez et al., 2012) presented a collaborative platform which is currently being used as the methodological support for the cognitive democracy known as e-cognocracy (Moreno-Jimenez, 2003a, 2004, 2006; Moreno-Jimenez & Polasek, 2003, 2005) and for identifying and classifying the messages or opinions that favour the different individual positions through the employment of quantitative (data mining) and qualitative (text mining) approaches. This paper represents the next step in the phase concerned with extraction of the policy-making arguments. Using opinion analysis techniques, the new e-learning tool extracts the arguments that support the different opinions. This tool has been applied to the discussion stage of a case study developed at the University of Zaragoza concerning the possible location of Europes biggest leisure complex (Gran Scala) in Aragon (Spain).

PRIOR-WK&E: Social Software for Policy Making in the Knowledge Society

This paper presents a social software application denominated as PRIOR-WK&E. It has been developed by the Zaragoza Multicriteria Decision Making Group (GDMZ) with the aim of responding to the challenges of policy making in the Knowledge Society. Three specific modules have been added to PRIOR, the collaborative tool used by the research group (GDMZ) for considering the multicriteria selection of a discrete set of alternatives. The first module (W), that deals with multiactor decision making through the Web, and the second (K), that concerns the extraction and diffusion of knowledge related to the scientific resolution of the problem, were explained in [1]. The new application strengthens securitization and includes a third module (E) that evaluates the effectiveness of public administrations policy making.

Managing multilinguality in organizations

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to show how multilinguality is permanently present in organizations in this global world, and how they should take into account the multilingual phenomenon specifically from the perspective of knowledge management in order to gain presence in markets. Design/methodology/approach – The approach followed by the authors consists of a review of the published literature addressing this issue during the last years, followed by a proposal of applicable technologies in each step of the information processing. Findings – The clearest finding is that if technology is not used for solving the problems that arise when dealing with multilingual contents, efficient information managing turns out a rather difficult task. Research limitations/implications – The paper points out a number of different states in the information flows, which make it possible to study and analyse the most appropriate technologies for their orderly treatment. A unified treatment of the information flows is re...

Interlinguas: a classical approach for the semantic web. a practical case

An efficient use of the web will imply the ability to find not only documents but also specific pieces of information according to users query. Right now, this last possibility is not tackled by current information extraction or question answering systems, since it requires both a deeper semantic understanding of queries and contents along with deductive capabilities. In this paper, the authors propose the use of Interlinguas as a plausible approach to search and extract specific pieces of information from a document, given the semantic nature of Interlinguas and their support for deduction. More concretely, the authors describe the UNL Interlinguas from the representational point of view and illustrate its deductive capabilities by means of an example.

Linguistic Patterns for Encyclopaedic Information Extraction

Information extraction has almost always focused on extracting retrievable data from a text. Approaches that manage to extract elaborated information have seldom been devised. Through the use of interlingua-type language-independent contents representation, the semantic relations of the contents can be used to search a set of information concerning a particular entity. This way, the person asking a question to find out something about a city or a person, for example, would have to know no more than the name to be used to run a search. This approach is very promising as the person asking the question does not have to know what type of information he or she can request from a documentary source. Our work targets the goal of, given a users query, providing a complete report about such topic or event, composed of what we consider encyclopaedic knowledge. We describe the origins of this research and the followed procedure, as well as an illustrative case of this on-going research.