Marieke van Erp

Analysis of named entity recognition and linking for tweets

Applying natural language processing for mining and intelligent information access to tweets (a form of microblog) is a challenging, emerging research area. Unlike carefully authored news text and other longer content, tweets pose a number of new challenges, due to their short, noisy, context-dependent, and dynamic nature. Information extraction from tweets is typically performed in a pipeline, comprising consecutive stages of language identification, tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and entity disambiguation (e.g. with respect to DBpedia). In this work, we describe a new Twitter entity disambiguation dataset, and conduct an empirical analysis of named entity recognition and disambiguation, investigating how robust a number of state-of-the-art systems are on such noisy texts, what the main sources of error are, and which problems should be further investigated to improve the state of the art.

Semantic technologies for historical research: A survey

During the nineties of the last century, historians and computer scientists created together a research agenda around the life cycle of historical information. It comprised the tasks of creation, design, enrichment, editing, retrieval, analysis and presentation of historical information with help of information technology. They also identified a number of problems and challenges in this field, some of them closely related to semantics and meaning. In this survey paper we study the joint work of historians and computer scientists in the use of Semantic Web methods and technologies in historical research. We analyse to what extent these contributions help in solving the open problems in the agenda of historians, and we describe open challenges and possible lines of research pushing further a still young, but promising, historical Semantic Web.

Digital hermeneutics: Agora and the online understanding of cultural heritage

Cultural heritage institutions are currently rethinking access to their collections to allow the public to interpret and contribute to their collections. In this work, we present the Agora project, an interdisciplinary project in which Web technology and theory of interpretation meet. This we call digital hermeneutics. The Agora project facilitates the understanding of historical events and improves the access to integrated online history collections. In this contribution, we focus on defining and modeling prototypical object-event and event-event relationships that support the interpretation of objects in cultural heritage collections. We present a use case in which we model historical events as well as relations between objects and events for a set of paintings from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam collection. Our use case shows how Web technology and theory of interpretation meet in the present, and what technological hurdles still need to be taken to fully support digital hermeneutics.

SemEval-2015 Task 4: TimeLine: Cross-Document Event Ordering

This paper describes the outcomes of the TimeLine task (Cross-Document Event Ordering), that was organised within the Time and Space track of SemEval-2015. Given a set of documents and a set of target entities, the task consisted of building a timeline for each entity, by detecting, anchoring in time and ordering the events involving that entity. The TimeLine task goes a step further than previous evaluation challenges by requiring participant systems to perform both event coreference and temporal relation extraction across documents. Four teams submitted the output of their systems to the four proposed subtracks for a total of 13 runs, the best of which obtained an F1-score of 7.85 in the main track (timeline creation from raw text).

Linked Open Piracy: A Story about e-Science, Linked Data, and Statistics

There is an abundance of semi-structured reports on events being written and made available on the World Wide Web on a daily basis. These reports are primarily meant for human use. A recent movement is the addition of RDF metadata to make automatic processing by computers easier. A fine example of this movement is the open government data initiative which, by representing data from spreadsheets and textual reports in RDF, strives to speed up the creation of geographical mashups and visual analytic applications. In this paper, we present a newly linked dataset and the method we used to automatically translate semi-structured reports on the Web to an RDF event model. We demonstrate how the semantic representation layer makes it possible to easily analyze and visualize the aggregated reports to answer domain questions through a SPARQL client for the R statistical programming language. We showcase our method on piracy attack reports issued by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC-CCS). Our pipeline includes conversion of the reports to RDF, linking their parts to external resources from the linked open data cloud and exposing them to the Web.

Linked open piracy

There is an abundance of semi-structured reports on events being written and made available on the World Wide Web on a daily basis. These reports are primarily meant for human use. A recent movement is the addition of RDF metadata to make automatic processing by computers easier. A fine example of this movement is the Open Government Data initiative which, by adding RDF meta-data to spreadsheets and textual reports, strives to speed up the creation of geographical mashups and visual analytics applications. In this paper, we present a new Open Linked Data RDF dataset and a method for automatically adding such RDF metadata to semi-structured reports. We showcase our method on piracy attack reports issued on the web by the International Chamber of Commerces International Maritime Bureau (ICC-CCS IMB). We create a Semantic Web representation with the Simple Event Model (SEM) from screen scrapes of the ICC-CCS website. We show how the event layer makes it possible to easily analyze and visualize the aggregated reports to answer domain questions. Our pipeline includes conversion of the reports to RDF, linking their parts to external resources from the Linked Open Data cloud and exposing them to the Web through a ClioPatria web server that hosts the RDF.

From information delivery to interpretation support: evaluating cultural heritage access on the web

In this paper, we present an evaluation framework for online access to cultural heritage. The framework enables the assessment of online cultural heritage applications in terms of their provision and support of information and interpretation. It is anchored in digital hermeneutics: the study and theory of the Web as a vehicle of (self)-interpretation. Digital hermeneutics considers the limits of automation and modelling on the one hand, and the interaction of people and technology on the other. In this paper, this philosophical issue will linger in the background, while we focus on the more practical issues of (1) explaining the evaluation framework and (2) describing our work in Agora in the context of that framework. We analyze twelve Web applications, representing the range of current state of the art in this field. This provides valuable insights into what cultural heritage applications on the Web do, can do, and how distinctive goals are to be achieved. Then we report on three user studies with the Agora demonstrator which made us reconsider a number of assumptions we made about the users needs for information and interpretation.

Hacking history via event extraction

Within cultural heritage collections, objects are often grounded in a particular historical setting. This setting can currently not be made explicit, as structured descriptions of events are either missing or not marked up explicitly. This paper reports a study on automatic extraction of an historical event thesaurus from unstructured texts. We show how this preliminary thesaurus accommodates event- and object-driven search and browsing of two cultural heritage collections.

Collected Research Questions Concerning Ontology Design Patterns

This chapter lists and discusses open challenges for the ODP community in the coming years, both in terms of research questions that will need be answered, and in terms of tooling and infrastructur ...

Lessons learnt from the Named Entity rEcognition and Linking (NEEL) challenge series

This work was supported by the H2020 FREME project (GA no. 644771), by the research grant from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant Number SFI/12/RC/2289, and by the CLARIAH-CORE project financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).