In the course of their research, art historians frequently need to refer to historical photo archives when attempting to authenticate works of art. This book, Mining Authoritativeness in Art Historical Photo Archives, provides an aid to retrieving relevant sources and assessing the textual authoritativeness – the internal grounds – of sources of attribution, and to evaluating the authoritativeness of cited scholars. The book aims to do three things: facilitate knowledge discovery in art historical photo archives, support users’ decision-making processes when evaluating contradictory attributions, and provide policies to improve the quality of information in art historical photo archives. The author’s approach is to leverage Semantic Web technologies in order to aggregate, assess, and recommend the most documented authorship attributions. At the same time, the retrieval process allows the providers of art historical data to define a low-cost data integration process with which to update and enrich their collection data. This conceptual framework for assessing questionable information will also be of value to those working in a number of other fields, such as archives, museums, and libraries, as well as to art historians.

Most people need textual or visual interfaces to help them make sense of Semantic Web data. In this book, the author investigates the problems associated with generating natural language summaries for structured data encoded as triples using deep neural networks. An end-to-end trainable architecture is proposed, which encodes the information from a set of knowledge graph triples into a vector of fixed dimensionality, and generates a textual summary by conditioning the output on this encoded vector. Different methodologies for building the required data-to-text corpora are explored to train and evaluate the performance of the approach. Attention is first focused on generating biographies, and the author demonstrates that the technique is capable of scaling to domains with larger and more challenging vocabularies. The applicability of the technique for the generation of open-domain Wikipedia summaries in Arabic and Esperanto – two under-resourced languages – is then discussed, and a set of community studies, devised to measure the usability of the automatically generated content by Wikipedia readers and editors, is described. Finally, the book explains an extension of the original model with a pointer mechanism that enables it to learn to verbalise in a different number of ways the content from the triples while retaining the capacity to generate words from a fixed target vocabulary. The evaluation of performance using a dataset encompassing all of English Wikipedia is described, with results from both automatic and human evaluation both of which highlight the superiority of the latter approach as compared to the original architecture.

Many web pages include structured data in the form of semantic markup, which can be transferred to the Resource Description Framework (RDF) or provide an interface to retrieve RDF data directly. This RDF data enables machines to automatically process and use the data. When applications need data from more than one source the data has to be integrated, and the automation of this can be challenging. Usually, vocabularies are used to concisely describe the data, but because of the decentralized nature of the web, multiple data sources can provide similar information with different vocabularies, making integration more difficult. This book, Multi-modal Data Fusion based on Embeddings, describes how similar statements about entities can be identified across sources, independent of the vocabulary and data modeling choices. Previous approaches have relied on clean and extensively modeled ontologies for the alignment of statements, but the often noisy data in a web context does not necessarily adhere to these prerequisites. In this book, the use of RDF label information of entities is proposed to tackle this problem. In combination with embeddings, the use of label information allows for a better integration of noisy data, something that has been empirically confirmed by experiment. The book presents two main scientific contributions: the vocabulary and modeling agnostic fusion approach on the purely textual label information, and the combination of three different modalities into one multi-modal embedding space for a more human-like notion of similarity. The book will be of interest to all those faced with the problem of processing data from multiple web-based sources.

The distributed setting of RDF stores in the cloud poses many challenges, including how to optimize data placement on the compute nodes to improve query performance. In this book, a novel benchmarking methodology is developed for data placement strategies; one that overcomes these limitations by using a data-placement-strategy-independent distributed RDF store to analyze the effect of the data placement strategies on query performance. Frequently used data placement strategies have been evaluated, and this evaluation challenges the commonly held belief that data placement strategies which emphasize local computation lead to faster query executions. Indeed, results indicate that queries with a high workload can be executed faster on hash-based data placement strategies than on, for example, minimal edge-cut covers. The analysis of additional measurements indicates that vertical parallelization (i.e., a well-distributed workload) may be more important than horizontal containment (i.e., minimal data transport) for efficient query processing. Two such data placement strategies are proposed: the first, found in the literature, is entitled overpartitioned minimal edge-cut cover, and the second is the newly developed molecule hash cover. Evaluation revealed a balanced query workload and a high horizontal containment, which lead to a high vertical parallelization. As a result, these strategies demonstrated better query performance than other frequently used data placement strategies. The book also tests the hypothesis that collocating small connected triple sets on the same compute node while balancing the amount of triples stored on the different compute nodes leads to a high vertical parallelization.

The increasing amount of structured data available on the Web is laying the foundations for a global-scale knowledge base. But the ever increasing amount of Semantic Web data gives rise to the question – how complete is that data? Though data on the Semantic Web is generally incomplete, some may indeed be complete. In this book, the author deals with how to manage and consume completeness information about Semantic Web data. In particular, the book explores how completeness information can guarantee the completeness of query answering. Optimization techniques for completeness reasoning and the conducting of experimental evaluations are provided to show the feasibility of the approaches, as well as a technique for checking the soundness of queries with negation via reduction to query completeness checking. Other topics covered include completeness information with timestamps, and two demonstrators – CORNER and COOL-WD – are provided to show how a completeness framework can be realized. Finally, the book investigates an automated method to generate completeness statements from text on the Web. The book will be of interest to anyone whose work involves dealing with Web-data completeness.

Social robots are embodied agents that perform knowledge-intensive tasks involving several kinds of information from different heterogeneous sources. This book, Engineering Background Knowledge for Social Robots, introduces a component-based architecture for supporting the knowledge-intensive tasks performed by social robots. The design was based on the requirements of a real socially-assistive robotic application, and all the components contribute to and benefit from the knowledge base which is its cornerstone. The knowledge base is structured by a set of interconnected and modularized ontologies which model the information, and is initially populated with linguistic, ontological and factual knowledge retrieved from Linked Open Data. Access to the knowledge base is guaranteed by Lizard, a tool providing software components, with an API for accessing facts stored in the knowledge base in a programmatic and object-oriented way. The author introduces two methods for engineering the knowledge needed by robots, a novel method for automatically integrating knowledge from heterogeneous sources with a frame-driven approach, and a novel empirical method for assessing foundational distinctions over Linked Open Data entities from a common-sense perspective. These effectively enable the evolution of the robot’s knowledge by automatically integrating information derived from heterogeneous sources and the generation of common-sense knowledge using Linked Open Data as an empirical basis. The feasibility and benefits of the architecture have been assessed through a prototype deployed in a real socially-assistive scenario, and the book presents two applications and the results of a qualitative and quantitative evaluation.

The latest advances in Artificial Intelligence and (deep) Machine Learning in particular revealed a major drawback of modern intelligent systems, namely the inability to explain their decisions in a way that humans can easily understand. While eXplainable AI rapidly became an active area of research in response to this need for improved understandability and trustworthiness, the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) has on the other hand a long-standing tradition in managing information in a symbolic, human-understandable form. This book provides the first comprehensive collection of research contributions on the role of knowledge graphs for eXplainable AI (KG4XAI), and the papers included here present academic and industrial research focused on the theory, methods and implementations of AI systems that use structured knowledge to generate reliable explanations. Introductory material on knowledge graphs is included for those readers with only a minimal background in the field, as well as specific chapters devoted to advanced methods, applications and case-studies that use knowledge graphs as a part of knowledge-based, explainable systems (KBX-systems). The final chapters explore current challenges and future research directions in the area of knowledge graphs for eXplainable AI. The book not only provides a scholarly, state-of-the-art overview of research in this subject area, but also fosters the hybrid combination of symbolic and subsymbolic AI methods, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.