Jorge Morato

Named Entity Recognition: Fallacies, challenges and opportunities

Abstract Named Entity Recognition serves as the basis for many other areas in Information Management. However, it is unclear what the meaning of Named Entity is, and yet there is a general belief that Named Entity Recognition is a solved task. In this paper we analyze the evolution of the field from a theoretical and practical point of view. We argue that the task is actually far from solved and show the consequences for the development and evaluation of tools. We discuss topics for further research with the goal of bringing the task back to the research scenario.

Knowledge management in biomedical libraries: A semantic web approach

In recent years, technological advances in high-throughput techniques and efficient data gathering methods, coupled with a world-wide effort in computational biology, have resulted in an enormous amount of life science data available in repositories devoted to biomedical literature. These repositories lack the ability to attain an effective and accurate search. Using semantic technologies as the key for interoperation enables searching and processing of biomedical literature in a more efficient way. However, emerging semantic applications take for granted specific knowledge that biomedical researchers may not have. This paper presents design principles for easy-to-use biomedical semantic applications by means of ontology-based annotations and faceted search. The proposed approach is backed with a usable prototype that shows the breakthroughs of adding these principles to a biomedical digital library where identifying and searching information are critical aspects for non-semantic Web experts.

Melodic similarity through shape similarity

We present a new geometric model to compute the melodic similarity of symbolic musical pieces. Melodies are represented as splines in the pitch-time plane, and their similarity is computed as the similarity of their shape. The model is very intuitive and it is transposition and time scale invariant. We have implemented it with a local alignment algorithm over sequences of n-grams that define spline spans. An evaluation with the MIREX 2005 collections shows that the model performs very well, obtaining the best effectiveness scores ever reported for these collections. Three systems based on this new model were evaluated in MIREX 2010, and the three systems obtained the best results.

On the definition of patterns for semantic annotation

The semantic annotation of documents is an additional advantage for retrieval, as long as the annotations and their maintenance process scale well. Automatic or semi-automatic annotation tools help in this matter with the use of patterns. In this paper we analyze the advantages of creating these patterns with standard web languages, as well as the requirements they should meet. We adopt the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification, by the W3C, initially intended for speech recognition in the Web. Our objective is to achieve its full adaptation to the information extraction processes, exploiting its powerful recognition, reuse and flexibility capabilities.

Semantic Web or Web 2.0? Socialization of the Semantic Web

Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web are approaches that target the improvement of the Web through the optimization of mechanisms for sharing information and resources. This document argues that Web 2.0 is not an immature stage of the Semantic Web but an orthogonal dimension of another Web aspect, the semantic. Unfortunately, both dimensions are not independent; the more developed a semantic representation of a system is, in order to be more useful for the Semantic Web, the more distant it is to the Web 2.0. A semantic system highly formalized is less intuitive and less usable by users. For that reason, with the intention of avoiding the inverse relation between both dimensions, eight proposals are positioned and discussed in order to enable a real Social Semantic Web.

Bringing undergraduate students closer to a real-world information retrieval setting: methodology and resources

We describe a pilot experiment to update the program of an Information Retrieval course for Computer Science undergraduates. We have engaged the students in the development of a search engine from scratch, and they have been involved in the elaboration, also from scratch, of a complete test collection to evaluate their systems. With this methodology they get a whole vision of the Information Retrieval process as they would find it in a real-world setting, and their direct involvement in the evaluation makes them realize the importance of these laboratory experiments in Computer Science. We show that this methodology is indeed reliable and feasible, and so we plan on improving and keep using it in the next years, leading to a public repository of resources for Information Retrieval courses.