Seminar
Semantics & Search
April 28th, 2006
Location: F1
09.15- Opening of seminar
09.20 Jon
Atle Gulla, NTNU
09.20- The Semantic Web and ontologies: what assumptions,
what justifications?
09.50 Karen Sparck-Jones,
Abstract. A great deal is
written about the Semantic Web as if it already materially exists. There is
also a widespread presumption that the Semantic Web requires an ontology, or
some relatable set of ontologies, of a thoroughly logical kind. In my talk I
will examine this presumption in relation to the manipulation of, and
especially access to, information expressed in natural language. The realities
of natural language information processing tasks show that aggressively formal
ontologies are effective only for limited domains and communities, and that
useful broad-cover, general-purpose ontologies have to be text-derived or at
least text-endorsed, and will necessarily be soft and imperfectly logical.
Short CV: Karen Sparck Jones is emeritus Professor of Computers and
Information at the Computer Laboratory,
Publicity information:
09.50- Emerging
Semantic Web Trends: Transparent
and Trustworthy Applications
10.20 Deborah
L. McGuinness,
Stanford
Abstract. As web applications proliferate,
more users (both people and agents) find themselves faced with decisions about
when and why to trust application advice. In order to trust information
obtained from arbitrary applications, users need to understand how the
information was obtained and what it depended upon. Particularly in web
applications that may use question answering systems that may be heuristic or
incomplete or data that is either of unknown origin or may be out of date, it
becomes more important to have information about how answers were obtained.
Emerging web systems will return answers augmented with
Publicity information:
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/publicity.html
10.20 Coffee Break (30 min)
10.50- Folksonomies and Ontologies
11.20 Csaba Veres, NTNU
Abstract: Two of the most
exciting themes to unite activity for transforming the Internet are the
Semantic Web, and Web2.0. While they differ in the formality of their inception
and the scope of the problems they aim to solve, they are linked by their common
reliance on metadata. The formal ontologies of the Semantic Web and the wild,
emergent folksonomies of Web2.0 have been pitted
against one another as competing means for managing the vast array of data on
the Internet. Advocates of folksonomy are particularly
vocal in claiming victory in this battle, pointing to the rapid adoption and
demonstrable popularity of Web2.0 services as opposed to the lack of widely
deployed Semantic Web applications. My perspective is that the link between the
two should be exploited to benefit both. My claim is that emergent folksonomies can be best understood as products of human
cognitive processes, and their analysis should focus on the way our mental
architecture performs classification. I present a technique that can be used to
expose the latent structure behind folksonomies,
which goes a long way towards creating useful ontologies. This is useful for
the Semantic Web because it is a rich source of cheap, relevant, structured
data to enable Semantic Web applications, and it is useful for Web2.0 in
enabling interoperability and rich search facilities across Web2.0 applications
11.20- Semantics
for Personalized Search - An Example
11.50 Per
Gunnar Auran,
Yahoo!
Abstract: This presentation
will introduce and example on how simple semantic relations can be used for a
personalized search experience. The speech will discuss a prototype search application
that was developed by Yahoo! Technologies Norway in 2004-2005 by a team lead by
the author.
Short CV: Per Gunnar Auran is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Technologies
Norway AS, where his main responsibility is search relevancy for Yahoo!'s vertical search platform, Vespa.
He is the technical lead for research releated to
document analysis and ranking, query analysis and semantics, personalized and
community search for Vespa.
From April 2000 to April
2003, Per Gunnar Auran was the
R&D Manager of the Data Analysis Group, at Fast Search &
Transfer ASA (FAST), focusing on web search data analysis and search relevancy
for AllTheWeb, a leading web search engine of the
time. Prior to that he was a research Scientist at the Norwegian Paper and Pulp
Research Institute. He holds MSc and PhD degrees from
the Norwegian Institute of Technology, specializing in engineering cybernetics.
12.00- Lunch
13.00
Seminar
Semantics & Search
April 28th, 2006
Location: ITV-454
13.00- Web Spam
and the Search Engines
13.20 Per
Holager,
NTNU
Abstract: Web spam is material
put on the WWW mainly to promote client sites towards the top of the results
listings of the search engines. The amount of such spam is so great that it is
a major problem: One study showed that about half sites represented in one
search engine data set were spam. This threatens the quality of results, which
should interest anyone using these services. This presentation discusses how
web spam works and describes how spam styles have developed through the last 15
years. It also presents some counter-measures that the engines may apply. One
surprising approach is commercial deals where the search engine companies
supply the spam contents.
13.20- Document space adapted ontology. Application in IR
13.40 Stein L. Tomassen,
NTNU
Abstract: Retrieval of correct
and precise information at the right time is essential in knowledge intensive
tasks requiring quick decision-making. In this talk, a method for utilizing
ontologies to enhance the quality of information retrieval (IR) by query
enrichment will be discussed. The focus is tuning a retrieval system by
adapting ontologies to provide both an in-depth understanding of the user's
needs as well as an easy integration with standard vector-space retrieval
systems. The ontology concepts are adapted to the domain terminology by
computing a feature vector for each concept. Then, the feature vector is used
to enrich a provided query.
13.40- On Automatic Reasoning and the Semantic
14.00 Johan
W. Klüwer,
UiO, DNV
14.00 Coffee Break (30 min)
14.30- AlViz ontology alignment visualization tool
14.50 Jennifer
Sampson, NTNU
Abstract: One of the main
reasons we need to align ontologies is to share a common understanding of the
structure of information among people or software agents. Ontology alignment is
the process where for each entity in one ontology we try to find a
corresponding entity in the second ontology with the same or the closest
meaning. While full automation is the ultimate goal, not everything can be done
by machine, user interaction is still essential in order to control, approve
and optimize the alignment results. We are developing a theoretical framework
for understanding ontology alignment quality and through this work we propose a
number of tools and techniques for achieving quality alignment results. I will
briefly describe one of these tools, AlViz, our new
visual ontology alignment tool for facilitating user understanding of the
alignment results.
14.50- Performance
Semantics in a Continuously Changing
15.10 Jon
Espen Ingvaldsen, NTNU
Abstract: Every thing changes.
Continuously. Markets change. Products change. Your competitors and customers
change. Laws and regulations change. Available technologies change. The
continuous changing environment requires that process-aware information systems
are very flexible with respect to coordination of applications, integration to
business partners, and performance monitoring.
This presentation describes
status and future directions for research work that aims at providing dynamic
performance information through a simple natural langue query interface.
15.10- Ontology Value in Information Management
15.30 Darijus Strasunskas, NTNU
Abstract: Ontology is applied
in wide range of application areas, e.g., semantic interoperability, view
alignment, etc. Therefore, the quality of ontologies is a delicate topic, e.g. an
appropriate level of granularity is application specific. In this presentation I discuss the application of
ontology to information management in general and analyze ontology quality
facets essential for improvement of information retrieval in particular.
15.30- Summarizing discussion & closing of seminar
16.00 Jon
Atle Gulla, NTNU