Chinese mineral question and answering system based on knowledge graph

Recently, there has been an upsurge in the number of knowledge graphs (KG) that can only be accessed by experts. Non-expert users lack an adequate understanding of the queried knowledge graph's vocabulary and structure, as well as the syntax of the structured query language used to express the user's information needs. To increase the user base of these KGs, a set of Question Answering (QA) systems that use natural language to query these knowledge graphs have been introduced. However, finding a benchmark that accurately evaluates the quality of a QA system is a difficult task due to (1) the high degree of variation in the fine-grained properties among the existing benchmarks, (2) the static nature of the existing benchmarks versus the evolving nature of KGs, and (3) the limited number of KGs targeted by existing benchmarks, which hinders the usability of QA systems in real-world deployment over KGs that are different from those that were used in the evaluation of the QA systems. In this paper, we introduce Maestro, a benchmark generation system for question answering over knowledge graphs. Maestro can generate a new benchmark for any KG given the KG and, optionally, a text corpus that covers this KG. The benchmark generated by Maestro is guaranteed to cover all the properties of the natural language questions and queries that were encountered in the literature as long as the targeted KG includes these properties. Maestro also generates high-quality natural language questions with various utterances that are on par with manually-generated ones to better evaluate QA systems.

Over the past decade, Knowledge Graphs (KG) have emerged as a prominent repository for storing facts about the world in a linked data architecture. Providing machines with the capability of exploring such Knowledge Graphs and answering natural language questions over them, has been an active area of research. The purpose of this work, is to delve further into the research of retrieving information stored in KGs, based on the natural language questions posed by the user. Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to produce a concise answer to a user question, such that the user is exempt from using KG vocabulary and overheads of learning a formal query language. Existing KGQA systems have achieved excellent results over Simple Questions, where the information required is limited to a single triple and a single formal query pattern. Our motivation is to improve the performance of KGQA over Complex Questions, where formal query patterns significantly vary, and a single triple is not confining for all the required information. Complex KGQA provides several challenges such as understanding semantics and syntactic structure of questions, Entity Linking, Relation Linking and Answer Representation. Lack of suitable datasets for complex question answering further adds to research gaps. Hence, in this thesis, we focus the research objective of laying the foundations for the advancement of the state-of-the-art for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs, by providing techniques to solve various challenges and provide resources to fill the research gaps. First, we propose Normalized Query Structure (NQS), which is a linguistic analyzer module that helps the QA system to detect inputs and intents and the relation between them in the users' question. NQS acts like an intermediate language between natural language questions and formal expressions to ease the process of query formulation for complex questions. We then developed a framework named LC-QuAD to generate large scale question answering dataset by reversing the process of question answering, thereby translating natural language questions from the formal query using intermediate templates. Our goal is to use this framework for high variations in the query patterns and create a large size dataset with minimum human effort. The first version of the dataset consists of 5,000 complex questions. By extending the LC-QuAD framework to support Reified KGs and crowd-sourcing, we published the second version of the dataset as LC-QuAD 2.0, consisting of 30,000 questions with their paraphrases and has higher complexity and new variations in the questions. To overcome the problem of Entity Linking and Relation Linking in KGQA, we develop EARL, a module performing these two tasks as a single joint task for complex question answering. We develop approaches for this module, first by formalizing the task as an instance of the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and the second approach uses machine learning to exploit the connection density between nodes in the Knowledge Graph. Lastly, we create another large scale dataset to answer verbalization and provide results for multiple baseline system s on it. The Verbalization dataset is introduced to make the system's response more human-like. The NQS based KGQA system was next to the best system in terms of accuracy on the QALD-5 dataset. We empirically prove that NQS is robust to tackle paraphrases of the questions. EARL achieves the state of the art results in Entity Linking and Relation Linking for question answering on several KGQA datasets. The dataset curated in this thesis has helped the research community to move forward in the direction of improving the accuracy of complex question answering as a task as other researchers too developed several KGQA systems and modules around these published datasets. With the large-scale datasets, we have encouraged the use of large scale machine learning, deep learning and emergence of new techniques to advance the state-of-the-art in complex question answering over knowledge graphs. We further developed core components for the KGQA pipeline to overcome the challenges of Question Understanding, Entity-Relation Linking and Answer Verbalization and thus achieve our research objective. All the proposed approaches mentioned in this thesis and the published resources are available at https://github.com/AskNowQA and are released under the umbrella project AskNow.

Last years witnessed a shift from the potential utility in digitisation to a crucial need to enjoy activities virtually. In fact, before 2019, data curators recognised the utility of performing data digitisation, while during the lockdown caused by the COVID-19, investing in virtual and remote activities to make culture survive became crucial as no one could enjoy Cultural Heritage in person. The Cultural Heritage community heavily invested in digitisation campaigns, mainly modelling data as Knowledge Graphs by becoming one of the most successful Semantic Web technologies application domains. Despite the vast investment in Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs, the syntactic complexity of RDF query languages, e.g., SPARQL, negatively affects and threatens data exploitation, risking leaving this enormous potential untapped. Thus, we aim to support the Cultural Heritage community (and everyone interested in Cultural Heritage) in querying Knowledge Graphs without requiring technical competencies in Semantic Web technologies. We propose an engaging exploitation tool accessible to all without losing sight of developers’ technological challenges. Engagement is achieved by letting the Cultural Heritage community leave the passive position of the visitor and actively create their Virtual Assistant extensions to exploit proprietary or public Knowledge Graphs in question-answering. By accessible to all, we mean that the proposed software framework is freely available on GitHub and Zenodo with an open-source license. We do not lose sight of developers’ technical challenges, which are carefully considered in the design and evaluation phases. This article first analyses the effort invested in publishing Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs to quantify data developers can rely on in designing and implementing data exploitation tools in this domain. Moreover, we point out challenges developers may face in exploiting them in automatic approaches. Second, it presents a domain-agnostic Knowledge Graph exploitation approach based on virtual assistants as they naturally enable question-answering features where users formulate questions in natural language directly by their smartphones. Then, we discuss the design and implementation of this approach within an automatic community-shared software framework (a.k.a. generator) of virtual assistant extensions and its evaluation in terms of performance and perceived utility according to end-users. Finally, according to a taxonomy of the Cultural Heritage field, we present a use case for each category to show the applicability of the proposed approach in the Cultural Heritage domain. In overviewing our analysis and the proposed approach, we point out challenges that a developer may face in designing virtual assistant extensions to query Knowledge Graphs, and we show the effect of these challenges in practice.

SParseQA: Sequential word reordering and parsing for answering complex natural language questions over knowledge graphs

Geoscience data associated with mineral resource surveys have become essential digital assets for governments and mining companies. The rapid increase in the volume of geoscience data makes it challenging to acquire knowledge quickly. In this study, we proposed and built a workflow that employs knowledge graph techniques, deep learning, question templates, and matching algorithms to provide a question-answering service for geologists involved in mineral resource surveys. Initially, we utilized deep-learning-based geological entities and their semantic relation reorganization, along with relational data mapping, to construct the mineral resource survey knowledge graph based on the ontology model. We then employed question template matching, a geological entity recognition model, and a sentence transformer to determine the optimal question template and generate a query statement for knowledge acquisition from a knowledge graph based on the Cypher language. Subsequently, we utilized a subgraph and a short abstract to express the results. This study demonstrates the utility of workflows for providing knowledge services in the field of mineral resource surveys. The results also suggest that further studies on geoscience pre-trained models, an informative library of question templates, and multimodal knowledge graphs are necessary to improve the performance of the knowledge graph-driven question-answering system.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have shown to be very important for applications such\nas personal assistants, question-answering systems, and search engines.\nTherefore, it is crucial to ensure their high quality. However, KGs inevitably\ncontain errors, duplicates, and missing values, which may hinder their adoption\nand utility in business applications, as they are not curated, e.g.,\nlow-quality KGs produce low-quality applications that are built on top of them.\nIn this vision paper, we propose a practical knowledge graph curation framework\nfor improving the quality of KGs. First, we define a set of quality metrics for\nassessing the status of KGs, Second, we describe the verification and\nvalidation of KGs as cleaning tasks, Third, we present duplicate detection and\nknowledge fusion strategies for enriching KGs. Furthermore, we give insights\nand directions toward a better architecture for curating KGs.\n

For better understanding user information needs, Google proposed the Knowledge Graph as supplements to the results returned by its search engine. Many search engines have also developed their own knowledge graph services. However, although there are many freely accessible structured datasets, such as Freebase, developers have to build the knowledge graph from scratch without any support from open source initiatives. Recently, in our preliminary work, we were trying to develop an open source Java Script plug-in, namely FKG.js (Free Knowledge Graph), for HTML5-based applications to easily extend their potential knowledge graph modules. In the plug-in, we also provided a visualization solution using freely accessible structured datasets from the Internet. In addition, we managed to propose server-side APIs for collecting user behavior patterns in order to optimize the display of the knowledge graph.

A knowledge graph (KG) consists of numerous triples, in which each triple, i.e., (head entity, relation, tail entity), denotes a real-world assertion. Many large-scale KGs have been developed, e.g., general-purpose KGs Freebase and YAGO. Also, lots of domain-specific KGs are emerging, e.g., COVID-19 KGs, biomedical KGs, and agricultural KGs. By embedding KGs into low-dimensional vectors, i.e., representations of entities and relations, we could integrate KGs into machine learning models and enhance the performance of many prediction tasks, including search, recommendations, and question answering. During the construction, refinement, embedding, and application of KGs, a variety of KG learning algorithms have been developed to handle challenges in various real-world scenarios. Moreover, graph neural networks have also brought new opportunities to KG learning. This workshop aims to engage with active researchers from KG communities, recommendation communities, natural language processing communities, and other communities, and deliver state-of-the-art research insights into the core challenges in KG learning.

While RDF was designed to make data easily readable by machines, it does not make data easily usable by end-users. Question Answering (QA) over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is seen as the technology which is able to bridge this gap. It aims to build systems which are capable of extracting the answer to a user’s natural language question from an RDF dataset.In recent years, many approaches were proposed which tackle the problem of QA over KGs. Despite such efforts, it is hard and cumbersome to create a Question Answering system on top of a new RDF dataset. The main open challenge remains portability, i.e., the possibility to apply a QA algorithm easily on new and previously untested RDF datasets.In this publication, we address the problem of portability by presenting an architecture for a portable QA system. We present a novel approach called QAnswer KG, which allows the construction of on-demand QA systems over new RDF datasets. Hence, our approach addresses non-expert users in QA domain.In this paper, we provide the details of QA system generation process. We show that it is possible to build a QA system over any RDF dataset while requiring minimal investments in terms of training. We run experiments using 3 different datasets.To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to design a process for non-expert users. We enable such users to efficiently create an on-demand, scalable, multilingual, QA system on top of any RDF dataset.

Natural language processing (NLP) is an important and challenging field of computer science. With the advent of computers and related technologies, NLP has grown out of the field of linguistics and is getting more attention in the computer field to support a wide variety of intelligent applications. NLP basically refers to automatic processing of natural languages by computers or machines in order to understand human language in written or spoken form. Ontologies are semantic models that provide general description of the types and structures of objects in a particular subject area or domain. Core components of ontology include concepts, relationships, instances, and axioms. Ontology is used to depict the hierarchical organization of concepts and their relationships. Knowledge graphs represent a set of interconnected descriptions of objects or concepts, and are sometimes referred to as semantic networks. In short, an ontology can be treated as a meta-model for data and knowledge graphs as a representation of the actual data or facts. An ontology (a formal description of relationships) plays a vital role in building a knowledge graph. Ontology and knowledge graphs have proven to be powerful tools to manage enterprise or big data. Today, a number of applications rely on ontology and knowledge graphs, such as knowledge management, information discovery, text extraction, semantic search, content-based recommendation, and intelligent chatbots. This chapter focuses on the importance of ontology and knowledge graphs for Developing NLP-based applications is difficult because computers require structured data, and human speech is highly complex, extremely diverse, unstructured in nature, and often ambiguous. In general, manual creation of knowledge graphs is expensive, therefore any automation of the process is highly desirable. Here, ontologies and knowledge graphs play a crucial role by providing a well-structured knowledge base, allowing semi-automatic creation of a lexicon to be used effectively in language translations, spellcheckers, keyword extraction and similar NLP applications.

There has been increasing research interest in inferring missing information from existing knowledge graphs (KGs) due to the emergence of a wide range of knowledge graph downstream applications such as question answering systems and search engines. Reasoning over knowledge graphs, which queries the correct entities only through a path consisting of multiple consecutive relations/hops from the starting entity, is an effective approach to do this task, but this topic has been rarely studied. As an attempt, the compositional training method equally treats the constructed multi-hop paths and one-hop relations to build training data, and then trains conventional knowledge graph completion models such as TransE in a compositional manner on the training data. However, it does not incorporate additional information along the paths during training, such as the intermediate entities and their types, which can be helpful to guide the reasoning towards the correct destination answers. Moreover, compositional training can only extend some existing models that can be composable, which significantly limits its applicability. Therefore, we design a novel model based on the recently proposed neural memory networks, which have large external memories and flexible writing/reading schemes, to address these problems. Specifically, we first introduce a single network layer, which is then used as the building block for a multi-layer neural network called TravNM, and a flexible memory updating method is developed to facilitate writing intermediate entity information during the multi-hop reasoning into memories. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments on large datasets, and the experimental results show the superiority of our proposed TravNM for reasoning over knowledge graphs with multiple hops.

Knowledge graphs display various entities and their relationships in the real world based on knowledge representation and can analyze and predict the intrinsic relationship between knowledge embeddings through data mining and information processing, which are widely used in search engines, web analytics and smart recommendation areas. As existing knowledge graph information is continuously created and grown, it is a curial task to determine whether the information in knowledge graph is correct and to complete the missing information. In response to this challenge, the researchers proposed a number of graph convolutional network (GCN)-based models to characterize knowledge graphs. The state-of-the-art model is R-GCN, which can effectively extract features. This paper deeply studies the algorithm ideas and results of the R-GCN model, explores whether the model can be further optimized in entity classification and link prediction, and finally, improves the original model and proposes a relational aggregation graph convolutional network. Specifically, this paper finds that a subset of the set of entities may be directly connected to a central entity. All the entities in this subset possess partially identical attributes. At the same time, the relationships between these entities and the central entity may be similar. These similar attributes and relationships can be abstractly aggregated into virtual entities and virtual relationships, respectively, to better extract the topological relationship features. This paper uses the FB15k dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed model on knowledge graph completion tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed RA-GCN model achieves a certain level improvement compared with the original model and that it can extract knowledge graph topological relationship characteristics more effectively.

Scheduling satellite tasks requires intricate coordination of numerous interconnected activities, posing challenges for ground station operators who struggle to decipher autonomous decision-making systems without explanatory responses. This paper advocates for explainable artificial intelligence to address this gap, leveraging large language models and knowledge graphs to enhance the transparency of scheduling logic. The study explores how operators can retrieve relevant information through natural language queries by integrating language processing with knowledge graphs as core data structures. This approach allows for manual access to knowledge graphs, supplemented with textual explanations, and enables operators to explore different scheduling scenarios, thus improving system robustness and adaptability. Additionally, this paper analyzes how current knowledge graphs and natural language processing techniques are utilized and how they can enhance explainability in satellite scheduling. It investigates the modeling of satellite schedules and environmental data within the knowledge graph. The study introduces a novel approach for generating categorized queries, executable code for knowledge graph data extraction via language modeling, and providing explanatory answers. These are evaluated for correctness, validity, and linguistic quality, demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach.

With the technological development of entity extraction, relationship extraction, knowledge reasoning, and entity linking, the research on knowledge graph has been carried out in full swing in recent years. To better promote the development of knowledge graph, especially in the Chinese language and in the financial industry, we built a high-quality data set, named financial research report knowledge graph (FR2KG), and organized the automated construction of financial knowledge graph evaluation at the 2020 China Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing Conference (CCKS2020). FR2KG consists of 17,799 entities, 26,798 relationship triples, and 1,328 attribute triples covering 10 entity types, 19 relationship types, and 6 attributes. Participants are required to develop a constructor that will automatically construct a financial knowledge graph based on the FR2KG. In addition, we summarized the technologies for automatically constructing knowledge graphs, and introduced the methods used by the winners and the results of this evaluation.

Advancements in research tools and databases have accelerated the scientific research life cycle. However, the chronological gap between published research, research in progress and emerging research topics is shrinking, thus putting pressure on researchers to find novel research ideas. The Literature Review (LR) process is a fundamental process that can identify gaps in the research literature and stimulate new research ideas. While many researchers adopt different methodologies conducting LR, there is no methodology that can comprehensively unveil innovative research ideas. This research aims to develop a search by concepts framework. The framework involves the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and Question Answering systems (QA) to ease finding relevant concepts related to a certain scientific topic along with associated files and citations that would in return maximize the efficiency of the scientific research. The framework also allows researchers to visualize the connection between different concepts similar to the cognitive imaging of the human mind.