Catherine Legg

Mining meaning from Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a goldmine of information; not just for its many readers, but also for the growing community of researchers who recognize it as a resource of exceptional scale and utility. It represents a vast investment of manual effort and judgment: a huge, constantly evolving tapestry of concepts and relations that is being applied to a host of tasks. This article provides a comprehensive description of this work. It focuses on research that extracts and makes use of the concepts, relations, facts and descriptions found in Wikipedia, and organizes the work into four broad categories: applying Wikipedia to natural language processing; using it to facilitate information retrieval and information extraction; and as a resource for ontology building. The article addresses how Wikipedia is being used as is, how it is being improved and adapted, and how it is being combined with other structures to create entirely new resources. We identify the research groups and individuals involved, and how their work has developed in the last few years. We provide a comprehensive list of the open-source software they have produced.

All You Can Eat Ontology-Building: Feeding Wikipedia to Cyc

In order to achieve genuine web intelligence, building some kind of large general machine-readable conceptual scheme (i.e. ontology) seems inescapable. Yet the past 20 years have shown that manual ontology-building is not practicable. The recent explosion of free user-supplied knowledge on the Web has led to great strides in automatic ontology-building, but quality-control is still a major issue. Ideally one should automatically build onto an already intelligent base. We suggest that the long-running Cyc project is able to assist here. We describe methods used to add 35K new concepts mined from Wikipedia to collections in ResearchCyc entirely automatically. Evaluation with 22 human subjects shows high precision both for the new concepts’ categorization, and their assignment as individuals or collections. Most importantly we show how Cyc itself can be leveraged for ontological quality control by ‘feeding’ it assertions one by one, enabling it to reject those that contradict its other knowledge.

Predication and the Problem of Universals

Abstract This paper contrasts the scholastic realisms of David Armstrong and Charles Peirce. It is argued that the so-called ‘problem of universals’ is not a problem in pure ontology (concerning whether universals exist) as Armstrong construes it to be. Rather, it extends to issues concerning which predicates should be applied where, issues which Armstrong sets aside under the label of ‘semantics’, and which from a Peircean perspective encompass even the fundamentals of scientific methodology. It is argued that Peirces scholastic realism not only presents a more nuanced ontology (distinguishing the existent from the real) but also provides more of a sense of why realism should be a position worth fighting for.

What is a logical diagram

Robert Brandom’s expressivism argues that not all semantic content may be made fully explicit. This view connects in interesting ways with recent movements in philosophy of mathematics and logic (e.g. Brown, Shin, Giaquinto) to take diagrams seriously—as more than a mere ‘heuristic aid’ to proof, but either proofs themselves, or irreducible components of such. However what exactly is a diagram in logic? Does this constitute a cleanly definable semiotic kind? The paper will argue that such a kind does exist in Charles Peirce’s conception of iconic signs, but that fully understood, logical diagrams involve a structured array of normative reasoning practices, as well as just a ‘picture on a page’.

Energy-efficient context-aware routing in heterogeneous WSN

This papers builds on our earlier work [16] by introducing a context-aware routing scheme for WSN that takes both energy consumption and heterogeneity of the network into account. We use a test case for clean water management, expressed in the underlying ontology. Our context-aware routing has been simulated and evaluated based on this use case. We report here about our evaluation results and provide comparisons with conventional approaches.

Argument-Forms Which Turn Invalid Over Infinite Domains: Physicalism as Supertask?

Argument-forms exist which are valid over finite but not infinite domains. Despite understanding of this by formal logicians, philosophers can be observed treating as valid arguments which are in fact invalid over infinite domains. In support of this claim I will first present an argument against the classical pragmatist theory of truth by Mark Johnston. Then, more ambitiously, I will suggest the fallacy lurks in certain arguments for physicalism taken for granted by many philosophers today.

‘Diagrammatic Teaching’: The Role of Iconic Signs in Meaningful Pedagogy

Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics uniquely divides signs into: (i) symbols, which pick out their objects by arbitrary convention or habit, (ii) indices, which pick out their objects by unmediated ‘pointing’, and (iii) icons, which pick out their objects by resembling them (as Peirce put it: an icon’s parts are related in the same way that the objects represented by those parts are themselves related). Thus representing structure is one of the icon’s greatest strengths. It is argued that the implications of scaffolding education iconically are profound: for providing learners with a navigable road-map of a subject matter, for enabling them to see further connections of their own in what is taught, and for supporting meaningful active learning. Potential objections that iconic teaching is excessively entertaining and overly susceptible to misleading rhetorical manipulation are addressed.

Massive Ontology Interface

This paper describes the Massive Ontology Interface (MOI), a web portal which facilitates interaction with a large ontology (over 200,000 concepts and 1.6M assertions) that is built automatically using the OpenCyc ontology as a backbone. The aim of the interface is to simplify interaction with the massive amounts of information and guide the user towards understanding the ontologys data. Using either a text or graph-based representation, users can discuss and edit the ontology. Social elements utilizing gamification techniques are included to encourage users to create and collaborate on stored knowledge as part of a web community. An evaluation by 30 users comparing MOI with OpenCycs original interface showed significant improvements in user understanding of the ontology, although full testing of the interfaces social elements lies in the future.

An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics: Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure, by Franklin, James

This rich book differs from much contemporary philosophy of mathematics in the author’s witty, down to earth style, and his extensive experience as a working mathematician. It accords with the field in focusing on whether mathematical entities are real. Franklin holds that recent discussion of this has oscillated between various forms of Platonism (whereby ‘there are Universals but they are pure Forms in an abstract world’ [13]), and various forms of nominalism (including logicism and formalism), whereby ‘the only realities are particular things’ [12]. He denies nominalism by holding that universals exist, and denies Platonism by holding that they are concrete, not abstract—looking to Aristotle for inspiration, in order to ‘reinstate mathematics in its deserved place as one of civilization’s prime grips on reality’ [5]. Challenges for such a position include the following: (i) accounting for the many idealized concepts within mathematics (e.g. imaginary numbers); (ii) explicating sets; and (iii) explaining, if mathematics is concrete, its difference from sciences such as physics. These challenges are squarely faced: (i) many idealizations should be understood as approximations (e.g. perfect circles), while others are realizable in principle (complex numbers) or are useful fictions (zero) [ch. 14]; (ii) set theory is mereology in disguise [38 43]; and (iii) mathematics is ‘at once necessary and about reality’ [ch. 5]. Also of considerable interest are many examples from areas of contemporary mathematics regrettably neglected by philosophers, such as operations research and network analysis [ch. 6]. The ‘Sydney school’ and the influence of the late D.M. Armstrong can be seen in the realist views held, and in forthright doctrinal statements such as ‘Science is about universals’ [12]. This materialist legacy leads Franklin to puzzle over the traditional Aristotelian account of mathematical understanding as identity between mind and concrete universals [188 91]. But he rightly notes that philosophy of mathematics offers sadly few other accounts of our remarkable capacity to ‘abstract universals and understand their relations’.

Book review. An Aristotelian realist philosophy of mathematics: Mathematics as the science of quantity and structure

This rich book differs from much contemporary philosophy of mathematics in the author’s witty, down to earth style, and his extensive experience as a working mathematician. It accords with the field in focusing on whether mathematical entities are real. Franklin holds that recent discussion of this has oscillated between various forms of Platonism (whereby ‘there are Universals but they are pure Forms in an abstract world’ [13]), and various forms of nominalism (including logicism and formalism), whereby ‘the only realities are particular things’ [12]. He denies nominalism by holding that universals exist, and denies Platonism by holding that they are concrete, not abstract—looking to Aristotle for inspiration, in order to ‘reinstate mathematics in its deserved place as one of civilization’s prime grips on reality’ [5]. Challenges for such a position include the following: (i) accounting for the many idealized concepts within mathematics (e.g. imaginary numbers); (ii) explicating sets; and (iii) explaining, if mathematics is concrete, its difference from sciences such as physics. These challenges are squarely faced: (i) many idealizations should be understood as approximations (e.g. perfect circles), while others are realizable in principle (complex numbers) or are useful fictions (zero) [ch. 14]; (ii) set theory is mereology in disguise [38 43]; and (iii) mathematics is ‘at once necessary and about reality’ [ch. 5]. Also of considerable interest are many examples from areas of contemporary mathematics regrettably neglected by philosophers, such as operations research and network analysis [ch. 6]. The ‘Sydney school’ and the influence of the late D.M. Armstrong can be seen in the realist views held, and in forthright doctrinal statements such as ‘Science is about universals’ [12]. This materialist legacy leads Franklin to puzzle over the traditional Aristotelian account of mathematical understanding as identity between mind and concrete universals [188 91]. But he rightly notes that philosophy of mathematics offers sadly few other accounts of our remarkable capacity to ‘abstract universals and understand their relations’.