Towards a Gateway for Knowledge Graph Schemas Collection, Analysis, and Embedding

One of the significant barriers to the training of statistical models on knowledge graphs is the difficulty that scientists have in finding the best input data to address their prediction goal. In addition to this, a key challenge is to determine how to manipulate these relational data, which are often in the form of particular triples (i.e., subject, predicate, object), to enable the learning process. Currently, many high-quality catalogs of knowledge graphs, are available. However, their primary goal is the re-usability of these resources, and their interconnection, in the context of the Semantic Web. This paper describes the LiveSchema initiative, namely, a first version of a gateway that has the main scope of leveraging the gold mine of data collected by many existing catalogs collecting relational data like ontologies and knowledge graphs. At the current state, LiveSchema contains - 1000 datasets from 4 main sources and offers some key facilities, which allow to: i) evolving LiveSchema, by aggregating other source catalogs and repositories as input sources; ii) querying all the collected resources; iii) transforming each given dataset into formal concept analysis matrices that enable analysis and visualization services; iv) generating models and tensors from each given dataset.

Lexical Diversity in Kinship Across Languages and Dialects

Languages are known to describe the world in diverse ways. Across lexicons, diversity is pervasive, appearing through phenomena such as lexical gaps and untranslatability. However, in computational resources, such as multilingual lexical databases, diversity is hardly ever represented. In this paper, we introduce a method to enrich computational lexicons with content relating to linguistic diversity. The method is verified through two large-scale case studies on kinship terminology, a domain known to be diverse across languages and cultures: one case study deals with seven Arabic dialects, while the other one with three Indonesian languages. Our results, made available as browseable and downloadable computational resources, extend prior linguistics research on kinship terminology, and provide insight into the extent of diversity even within linguistically and culturally close communities.

A semantics-driven methodology for high-quality image annotation

Recent work in Machine Learning and Computer Vision has highlighted the presence of various types of systematic flaws inside ground truth object recognition benchmark datasets. Our basic tenet is that these flaws are rooted in the many-to-many mappings which exist between the visual information encoded in images and the intended semantics of the labels annotating them. The net consequence is that the current annotation process is largely under-specified, thus leaving too much freedom to the subjective judgment of annotators. In this paper, we propose vTelos, an integrated Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Representation, and Computer Vision methodology whose main goal is to make explicit the (otherwise implicit) intended annotation semantics, thus minimizing the number and role of subjective choices. A key element of vTelos is the exploitation of the WordNet lexico-semantic hierarchy as the main means for providing the meaning of natural language labels and, as a consequence, for driving the annotation of images based on the objects and the visual properties they depict. The methodology is validated on images populating a subset of the ImageNet hierarchy.

Diversity and Language Technology: How Techno-Linguistic Bias Can Cause Epistemic Injustice

It is well known that AI-based language technology -- large language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries, and corpora -- is currently limited to 2 to 3 percent of the world's most widely spoken and/or financially and politically best supported languages. In response, recent research efforts have sought to extend the reach of AI technology to ``underserved languages.'' In this paper, we show that many of these attempts produce flawed solutions that adhere to a hard-wired representational preference for certain languages, which we call techno-linguistic bias. Techno-linguistic bias is distinct from the well-established phenomenon of linguistic bias as it does not concern the languages represented but rather the design of the technologies. As we show through the paper, techno-linguistic bias can result in systems that can only express concepts that are part of the language and culture of dominant powers, unable to correctly represent concepts from other communities. We argue that at the root of this problem lies a systematic tendency of technology developer communities to apply a simplistic understanding of diversity which does not do justice to the more profound differences that languages, and ultimately the communities that speak them, embody. Drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice, we point to the broader sociopolitical consequences of the bias we identify and show how it can lead not only to a disregard for valuable aspects of diversity but also to an under-representation of the needs and diverse worldviews of marginalized language communities.

Towards Bridging the Digital Language Divide

It is a well-known fact that current AI-based language technology -- language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries and corpora -- focuses on the world's 2-3% most widely spoken languages. Recent research efforts have attempted to expand the coverage of AI technology to `under-resourced languages.' The goal of our paper is to bring attention to a phenomenon that we call linguistic bias: multilingual language processing systems often exhibit a hardwired, yet usually involuntary and hidden representational preference towards certain languages. Linguistic bias is manifested in uneven per-language performance even in the case of similar test conditions. We show that biased technology is often the result of research and development methodologies that do not do justice to the complexity of the languages being represented, and that can even become ethically problematic as they disregard valuable aspects of diversity as well as the needs of the language communities themselves. As our attempt at building diversity-aware language resources, we present a new initiative that aims at reducing linguistic bias through both technological design and methodology, based on an eye-level collaboration with local communities.

Automatic Counterfactual Augmentation for Robust Text Classification Based on Word-Group Search

Despite large-scale pre-trained language models have achieved striking results for text classificaion, recent work has raised concerns about the challenge of shortcut learning. In general, a keyword is regarded as a shortcut if it creates a superficial association with the label, resulting in a false prediction. Conversely, shortcut learning can be mitigated if the model relies on robust causal features that help produce sound predictions. To this end, many studies have explored post-hoc interpretable methods to mine shortcuts and causal features for robustness and generalization. However, most existing methods focus only on single word in a sentence and lack consideration of word-group, leading to wrong causal features. To solve this problem, we propose a new Word-Group mining approach, which captures the causal effect of any keyword combination and orders the combinations that most affect the prediction. Our approach bases on effective post-hoc analysis and beam search, which ensures the mining effect and reduces the complexity. Then, we build a counterfactual augmentation method based on the multiple word-groups, and use an adaptive voting mechanism to learn the influence of different augmentated samples on the prediction results, so as to force the model to pay attention to effective causal features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by several tasks on 8 affective review datasets and 4 toxic language datasets, including cross-domain text classificaion, text attack and gender fairness test.

Building Interoperable Electronic Health Records as Purpose-Driven Knowledge Graphs

When building a new application we are increasingly confronted with the need of reusing and integrating pre-existing knowledge. Nevertheless, it is a fact that this prior knowledge is virtually impossible to reuse as-is. This is true also in domains, e.g., eHealth, where a lot of effort has been put into developing high-quality standards and reference ontologies, e.g. FHIR1. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology, called iTelos, which enables data and knowledge reuse towards the construction of Interoperable Electronic Health Records (iEHR). The key intuition is that the data level and the schema level of an application should be developed independently, thus allowing for maximum flexibility in the reuse of the prior knowledge, but under the overall guidance of the needs to be satisfied, formalized as competence queries. This intuition is implemented by codifying all the requirements, including those concerning reuse, as part of a purpose defined a priori, which is then used to drive a middle-out development process where the application schema and data are continuously aligned. The proposed methodology is validated through its application to a large-scale case study.

Egocentric Hierarchical Visual Semantics

We are interested in aligning how people think about objects and what machines perceive, meaning by this the fact that object recognition, as performed by a machine, should follow a process which resembles that followed by humans when thinking of an object associated with a certain concept. The ultimate goal is to build systems which can meaningfully interact with their users, describing what they perceive in the users' own terms. As from the field of Lexical Semantics, humans organize the meaning of words in hierarchies where the meaning of, e.g., a noun, is defined in terms of the meaning of a more general noun, its genus, and of one or more differentiating properties, its differentia. The main tenet of this paper is that object recognition should implement a hierarchical process which follows the hierarchical semantic structure used to define the meaning of words. We achieve this goal by implementing an algorithm which, for any object, recursively recognizes its visual genus and its visual differentia. In other words, the recognition of an object is decomposed in a sequence of steps where the locally relevant visual features are recognized. This paper presents the algorithm and a first evaluation.

Recognizing Entity Types via Properties

The mainstream approach to the development of ontologies is merging ontologies encoding different information, where one of the major difficulties is that the heterogeneity motivates the ontology merging but also limits high-quality merging performance. Thus, the entity type (etype) recognition task is proposed to deal with such heterogeneity, aiming to infer the class of entities and etypes by exploiting the information encoded in ontologies. In this paper, we introduce a property-based approach that allows recognizing etypes on the basis of the properties used to define them. From an epistemological point of view, it is in fact properties that characterize entities and etypes, and this definition is independent of the specific labels and hierarchical schemas used to define them. The main contribution consists of a set of property-based metrics for measuring the contextual similarity between etypes and entities, and a machine learning-based etype recognition algorithm exploiting the proposed similarity metrics. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the experimental results show the validity of the similarity metrics and the superiority of the proposed etype recognition algorithm.

Incremental Image Labeling via Iterative Refinement

Data quality is critical for multimedia tasks, while various types of systematic flaws are found in image benchmark datasets, as discussed in recent work. In particular, the existence of the semantic gap problem leads to a many-to-many mapping between the information extracted from an image and its linguistic description. This unavoidable bias further leads to poor performance on current computer vision tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a Knowledge Representation (KR)-based methodology to provide guidelines driving the labeling process, thereby indirectly introducing intended semantics in ML models. Specifically, an iterative refinement-based annotation method is proposed to optimize data labeling by organizing objects in a classification hierarchy according to their visual properties, ensuring that they are aligned with their linguistic descriptions. Preliminary results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.