Zareen Syed

Creating and Exploiting a Hybrid Knowledge Base for Linked Data

Twenty years ago Tim Berners-Lee proposed a distributed hypertext system based on standard Internet protocols. The Web that resulted fundamentally changed the ways we share information and services, both on the public Internet and within organizations. That original proposal contained the seeds of another effort that has not yet fully blossomed: a Semantic Web designed to enable computer programs to share and understand structured and semi-structured information easily. We will review the evolution of the idea and technologies to realize a Web of Data and describe how we are exploiting them to enhance information retrieval and information extraction. A key resource in our work is Wikitology, a hybrid knowledge base of structured and unstructured information extracted from Wikipedia.

UMBC_Ebiquity-SFQ: Schema Free Querying System

Users need better ways to explore large complex linked data resources. Using SPARQL requires not only mastering its syntax and semantics but also understanding the RDF data model, the ontology and URIs for entities of interest. Natural language question answering systems solve the problem, but these are still subjects of research. The Schema agnostic SPARQL queries task defined in SAQ-2015 challenge consists of schema-agnostic queries following the syntax of the SPARQL standard, where the syntax and semantics of oper- ators are maintained, while users are free to choose words, phrases and entity names irrespective of the underlying schema or ontology. This combination of query skeleton with keywords helps to remove some of the ambiguity. We describe our framework for handling schema agnostic or schema free queries and discuss enhancements to handle the SAQ-2015 challenge queries. The key contributions are the robust methods that combine statistical association and semantic similarity to map user terms to the most appropriate classes and properties used in the underlying ontology and type inference for user input concepts based on concept linking.