Department for Informatics, University of Oslo, The Alan Turing Institute
Abstract:Knowledge Graphs (KG) are the backbone of many data-intensive applications since they can represent data coupled with its meaning and context. Aligning KGs across different domains and providers is necessary to afford a fuller and integrated representation. A severe limitation of current KG alignment (KGA) algorithms is that they fail to articulate logical thinking and reasoning with lexical, structural, and semantic data learning. Deep learning models are increasingly popular for KGA inspired by their good performance in other tasks, but they suffer from limitations in explainability, reasoning, and data efficiency. Hybrid neurosymbolic learning models hold the promise of integrating logical and data perspectives to produce high-quality alignments that are explainable and support validation through human-centric approaches. This paper examines the current state of the art in KGA and explores the potential for neurosymbolic integration, highlighting promising research directions for combining these fields.
Abstract:Extrapolation of adverse biological (toxic) effects of chemicals is an important contribution to expand available hazard data in (eco)toxicology without the use of animals in laboratory experiments. In this work, we extrapolate effects based on a knowledge graph (KG) consisting of the most relevant effect data as domain-specific background knowledge. An effect prediction model, with and without background knowledge, was used to predict mean adverse biological effect concentration of chemicals as a prototypical type of stressors. The background knowledge improves the model prediction performance by up to 40\% in terms of $R^2$ (\ie coefficient of determination). We use the KG and KG embeddings to provide quantitative and qualitative insights into the predictions. These insights are expected to improve the confidence in effect prediction. Larger scale implementation of such extrapolation models should be expected to support hazard and risk assessment, by simplifying and reducing testing needs.
Abstract:Automating ontology curation is a crucial task in knowledge engineering. Prediction by machine learning techniques such as semantic embedding is a promising direction, but the relevant research is still preliminary. In this paper, we present a class subsumption prediction method named BERTSubs, which uses the pre-trained language model BERT to compute contextual embeddings of the class labels and customized input templates to incorporate contexts of surrounding classes. The evaluation on two large-scale real-world ontologies has shown its better performance than the state-of-the-art.
Abstract:Semantic embedding of knowledge graphs has been widely studied and used for prediction and statistical analysis tasks across various domains such as Natural Language Processing and the Semantic Web. However, less attention has been paid to developing robust methods for embedding OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies. In this paper, we propose a language model based ontology embedding method named OWL2Vec*, which encodes the semantics of an ontology by taking into account its graph structure, lexical information and logic constructors. Our empirical evaluation with three real world datasets suggests that OWL2Vec* benefits from these three different aspects of an ontology in class membership prediction and class subsumption prediction tasks. Furthermore, OWL2Vec* often significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in our experiments.
Abstract:The usefulness and usability of knowledge bases (KBs) is often limited by quality issues. One common issue is the presence of erroneous assertions, often caused by lexical or semantic confusion. We study the problem of correcting such assertions, and present a general correction framework which combines lexical matching, semantic embedding, soft constraint mining and semantic consistency checking. The framework is evaluated using DBpedia and an enterprise medical KB.
Abstract:Experimental effort and animal welfare are concerns when exploring the effects a compound has on an organism. Appropriate methods for extrapolating chemical effects can further mitigate these challenges. In this paper we present the efforts to (i) (pre)process and gather data from public and private sources, varying from tabular files to SPARQL endpoints, (ii) integrate the data and represent them as a knowledge graph with richer semantics. This knowledge graph is further applied to facilitate the retrieval of the relevant data for a ecological risk assessment task, extrapolation of effect data, where two prediction techniques are developed.
Abstract:Exploring the effects a chemical compound has on a species takes a considerable experimental effort. Appropriate methods for estimating and suggesting new effects can dramatically reduce the work needed to be done by a laboratory. In this paper we explore the suitability of using a knowledge graph embedding approach for ecotoxicological effect prediction. A knowledge graph has been constructed from publicly available data sets, including a species taxonomy and chemical classification and similarity. The publicly available effect data is integrated to the knowledge graph using ontology alignment techniques. Our experimental results show that the knowledge graph based approach improves the selected baselines.
Abstract:Ontology-based knowledge bases (KBs) like DBpedia are very valuable resources, but their usefulness and usability is limited by various quality issues. One such issue is the use of string literals instead of semantically typed entities. In this paper we study the automated canonicalization of such literals, i.e., replacing the literal with an existing entity from the KB or with a new entity that is typed using classes from the KB. We propose a framework that combines both reasoning and machine learning in order to predict the relevant entities and types, and we evaluate this framework against state-of-the-art baselines for both semantic typing and entity matching.
Abstract:The usefulness of tabular data such as web tables critically depends on understanding their semantics. This study focuses on column type prediction for tables without any meta data. Unlike traditional lexical matching-based methods, we propose a deep prediction model that can fully exploit a table's contextual semantics, including table locality features learned by a Hybrid Neural Network (HNN), and inter-column semantics features learned by a knowledge base (KB) lookup and query answering algorithm.It exhibits good performance not only on individual table sets, but also when transferring from one table set to another.
Abstract:Transfer learning which aims at utilizing knowledge learned from one problem (source domain) to solve another different but related problem (target domain) has attracted wide research attentions. However, the current transfer learning methods are mostly uninterpretable, especially to people without ML expertise. In this extended abstract, we brief introduce two knowledge graph (KG) based frameworks towards human understandable transfer learning explanation. The first one explains the transferability of features learned by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) from one domain to another through pre-training and fine-tuning, while the second justifies the model of a target domain predicted by models from multiple source domains in zero-shot learning (ZSL). Both methods utilize KG and its reasoning capability to provide rich and human understandable explanations to the transfer procedure.