The ever-increasing use of the internet by terrorist groups as a platform for the dissemination of radical, violent ideologies is well documented. The internet has, in this way, become a breeding ground for potential lone-wolf terrorists; that is, individuals who commit acts of terror inspired by the ideological rhetoric emitted by terrorist organizations. These individuals are characterized by their lack of formal affiliation with terror organizations, making them difficult to intercept with traditional intelligence techniques. The radicalization of individuals on the internet poses a considerable threat to law enforcement and national security officials. This new medium of radicalization, however, also presents new opportunities for the interdiction of lone wolf terrorism. This dissertation is an account of the development and evaluation of an information technology (IT) framework for detecting potentially radicalized individuals on social media sites and Web fora. Unifying Collective Action Framing Theory (CAFT) and a radicalization model of lone wolf terrorism, this dissertation analyzes a corpus of propaganda documents produced by several, radically different, terror organizations. This analysis provides the building blocks to define a knowledge model of terrorist ideological framing that is implemented as a Semantic Web Ontology. Using several techniques for ontology guided information extraction, the resultant ontology can be accurately processed from textual data sources. This dissertation subsequently defines several techniques that leverage the populated ontological representation for automatically identifying individuals who are potentially radicalized to one or more terrorist ideologies based on their postings on social media and other Web fora. The dissertation also discusses how the ontology can be queried using intuitive structured query languages to infer triggering events in the news. The prototype system is evaluated in the context of classification and is shown to provide state of the art results. The main outputs of this research are (1) an ontological model of terrorist ideologies (2) an information extraction framework capable of identifying and extracting terrorist ideologies from text, (3) a classification methodology for classifying Web content as resonating the ideology of one or more terrorist groups and (4) a methodology for rapidly identifying news content of relevance to one or more terrorist groups.

A extração de Interações Proteína-Proteína (IPPs) a partir de texto é um problema relevante na área biomédica e um desafio na área de aprendizado de máquina. Na área biomédica, as IPPs são fundamentais para compreender o funcionamento dos seres vivos. No entanto, o número de artigos relacionados com IPPs está aumentando rapidamente, sendo impraticável identicá-las e catalogá-las manualmente. Por exemplo, no caso das IPPs humanas apenas 10% foram catalogadas. Por outro lado, em aprendizado de máquina, métodos baseados em kernels são frequentemente empregados para extrair automaticamente IPPs, atingindo resultados considerados estado da arte. Esses métodos usam informações léxicas, sintáticas ou semânticas como características. Entretanto, os resultados ainda são insuficientes, atingindo uma taxa relativamente baixa, em termos da medida F, devido à complexidade do problema. Apesar dos esforços em produzir kernels, cada vez mais sofisticados, usando árvores sintáticas como árvores constituintes ou de dependência, pouco é conhecido sobre o desempenho de outras abordagens de aprendizado de máquina como, por exemplo, as redes bayesianas. As àrvores constituintes são estruturas de grafos que contêm informação importante da gramática subjacente as sentenças de textos contendo IPPs. Por outro lado, a rede bayesiana permite modelar algumas regras da gramática e atribuir para elas uma distribuição de probabilidade de acordo com as sentenças de treinamento. Neste trabalho de mestrado propõe-se um método para construção automática de redes bayesianas a partir de árvores contituintes para extração de IPPs. O método foi testado em cinco corpora padrões da extração de IPPs, atingindo resultados competitivos, em alguns casos melhores, em comparação a métodos do estado da arte / Extracting Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) from text is a relevant problem in the biomedical field and a challenge in the area of machine learning. In the biomedical field, the PPIs are fundamental to understand the functioning of living organisms. However, the number of articles related to PPIs is increasing rapidly, hence it is impractical to identify and catalog them manually. For example, in the case of human PPIs only 10 % have been cataloged. On the other hand, machine learning methods based on kernels are often employed to automatically extract PPIs, achieving state of the art results. These methods use lexical, syntactic and semantic information as features. However, the results are still poor, reaching a relatively low rate of F-measure due to the complexity of the problem. Despite efforts to produce sophisticate kernels, using syntactic trees as constituent or dependency trees, little is known about the performance of other Machine Learning approaches, eg, Bayesian networks. Constituent tree structures are graphs which contain important information of the underlying grammar in sentences containing PPIs. On the other hand, the Bayesian network allows modeling some rules of grammar and assign to them a probability distribution according to the training sentences. In this master thesis we propose a method for automatic construction of Bayesian networks from constituent trees for extracting PPIs. The method was tested in five corpora, considered benchmark of extraction of PPI, achieving competitive results, and in some cases better results when compared to state of the art methods

BACKGROUND: Ontologies play a major role in life sciences, enabling a number of applications, from new data integration to knowledge verification. SNOMED CT is a large medical ontology that is formally defined so that it ensures global consistency and support of complex reasoning tasks. Most biomedical ontologies and taxonomies on the other hand define concepts only textually, without the use of logic. Here, we investigate how to automatically generate formal concept definitions from textual ones. We develop a method that uses machine learning in combination with several types of lexical and semantic features and outputs formal definitions that follow the structure of SNOMED CT concept definitions. RESULTS: We evaluate our method on three benchmarks and test both the underlying relation extraction component as well as the overall quality of output concept definitions. In addition, we provide an analysis on the following aspects: (1) How do definitions mined from the Web and literature differ from the ones mined from manually created definitions, e.g., MeSH? (2) How do different feature representations, e.g., the restrictions of relations' domain and range, impact on the generated definition quality?, (3) How do different machine learning algorithms compare to each other for the task of formal definition generation?, and, (4) What is the influence of the learning data size to the task? We discuss all of these settings in detail and show that the suggested approach can achieve success rates of over 90%. In addition, the results show that the choice of corpora, lexical features, learning algorithm and data size do not impact the performance as strongly as semantic types do. Semantic types limit the domain and range of a predicted relation, and as long as relations' domain and range pairs do not overlap, this information is most valuable in formalizing textual definitions. CONCLUSIONS: The analysis presented in this manuscript implies that automated methods can provide a valuable contribution to the formalization of biomedical knowledge, thus paving the way for future applications that go beyond retrieval and into complex reasoning. The method is implemented and accessible to the public from: https://github.com/alifahsyamsiyah/learningDL.

Background Ontologies play a major role in life sciences, enabling a number of applications, from new data integration to knowledge verification. SNOMED CT is a large medical ontology that is formally defined so that it ensures global consistency and support of complex reasoning tasks. Most biomedical ontologies and taxonomies on the other hand define concepts only textually, without the use of logic. Here, we investigate how to automatically generate formal concept definitions from textual ones. We develop a method that uses machine learning in combination with several types of lexical and semantic features and outputs formal definitions that follow the structure of SNOMED CT concept definitions. Results We evaluate our method on three benchmarks and test both the underlying relation extraction component as well as the overall quality of output concept definitions. In addition, we provide an analysis on the following aspects: (1) How do definitions mined from the Web and literature differ from the ones mined from manually created definitions, e.g., MeSH? (2) How do different feature representations, e.g., the restrictions of relations’ domain and range, impact on the generated definition quality?, (3) How do different machine learning algorithms compare to each other for the task of formal definition generation?, and, (4) What is the influence of the learning data size to the task? We discuss all of these settings in detail and show that the suggested approach can achieve success rates of over 90%. In addition, the results show that the choice of corpora, lexical features, learning algorithm and data size do not impact the performance as strongly as semantic types do. Semantic types limit the domain and range of a predicted relation, and as long as relations’ domain and range pairs do not overlap, this information is most valuable in formalizing textual definitions. Conclusions The analysis presented in this manuscript implies that automated methods can provide a valuable contribution to the formalization of biomedical knowledge, thus paving the way for future applications that go beyond retrieval and into complex reasoning. The method is implemented and accessible to the public from: https://github.com/alifahsyamsiyah/learningDL.

Le peuplement de base de connaissance (KBP) est une tâche importante qui présente de nombreux défis pour le traitement automatique des langues. L'objectif de cette tâche est d'extraire des connaissances de textes et de les structurer afin de compléter une base de connaissances. Nous nous sommes intéressés à la reconnaissance de relations entre entités. L'extraction de relations (RE) entre une paire de mentions d'entités est une tâche difficile en particulier pour les relations en domaine ouvert. Généralement, ces relations sont extraites en fonction des informations lexicales et syntaxiques au niveau de la phrase. Cependant, l'exploitation d'informations globales sur les entités n'a pas encore été explorée. Nous proposons d'extraire un graphe d'entités du corpus global et de calculer des caractéristiques sur ce graphe afin de capturer des indices des relations entre paires d'entités. Pour évaluer la pertinence des fonctionnalités proposées, nous les avons testées sur une tâche de validation de relation dont le but est de décider l'exactitude de relations extraites par différents systèmes. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que les caractéristiques proposées conduisent à améliorer les résultats de l'état de l'art. / Knowledge Base Population (KBP) is an important and challenging task specially when it has to be done automatically. The objective of KBP task is to make a collection of facts of the world. A Knowledge Base (KB) contains different entities, relationships among them and various properties of the entities. Relation extraction (RE) between a pair of entity mentions from text plays a vital role in KBP task. RE is also a challenging task specially for open domain relations. Generally, relations are extracted based on the lexical and syntactical information at the sentence level. However, global information about known entities has not been explored yet for RE task. We propose to extract a graph of entities from the overall corpus and to compute features on this graph that are able to capture some evidence of holding relationships between a pair of entities. In order to evaluate the relevance of the proposed features, we tested them on a task of relation validation which examines the correctness of relations that are extracted by different RE systems. Experimental results show that the proposed features lead to outperforming the state-of-the-art system.

The Data Web has undergone a tremendous growth period. It currently consists of more then 3300 publicly available knowledge bases describing millions of resources from various domains, such as life sciences, government or geography, with over 89 billion facts. In the same way, the Document Web grew to the state where approximately 4.55 billion websites exist, 300 million photos are uploaded on Facebook as well as 3.5 billion Google searches are performed on average every day. However, there is a gap between the Document Web and the Data Web, since for example knowledge bases available on the Data Web are most commonly extracted from structured or semi-structured sources, but the majority of information available on the Web is contained in unstructured sources such as news articles, blog post, photos, forum discussions, etc. As a result, data on the Data Web not only misses a significant fragment of information but also suffers from a lack of actuality since typical extraction methods are time-consuming and can only be carried out periodically. Furthermore, provenance information is rarely taken into consideration and therefore gets lost in the transformation process. In addition, users are accustomed to entering keyword queries to satisfy their information needs. With the availability of machine-readable knowledge bases, lay users could be empowered to issue more specific questions and get more precise answers. In this thesis, we address the problem of Relation Extraction, one of the key challenges pertaining to closing the gap between the Document Web and the Data Web by four means. First, we present a distant supervision approach that allows finding multilingual natural language representations of formal relations already contained in the Data Web. We use these natural language representations to find sentences on the Document Web that contain unseen instances of this relation between two entities. Second, we address the problem of data actuality by presenting a real-time data stream RDF extraction framework and utilize this framework to extract RDF from RSS news feeds. Third, we present a novel fact validation algorithm, based on natural language representations, able to not only verify or falsify a given triple, but also to find trustworthy sources for it on the Web and estimating a time scope in which the triple holds true. The features used by this algorithm to determine if a website is indeed trustworthy are used as provenance information and therewith help to create metadata for facts in the Data Web. Finally, we present a question answering system that uses the natural language representations to map natural language question to formal SPARQL queries, allowing lay users to make use of the large amounts of data available on the Data Web to satisfy their information need.

The use cases of Information Extraction (IE) are more or less endless, often consisting of a combination of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE). One use case of IE is the extraction of transaction information from Norwegian insider transaction Press Releases (PRs), where a transaction consists of at most four entities: the name of the owner performing the transaction, the number of shares transferred, the transaction date, and the price of the shares bought or sold. The relationships between the entities define which entity belongs to which transaction, and whether shares were bought or sold. This report has investigated how a pair of supervised NER and RE models extract this information. Since these Norwegian PRs were not labeled, two different approaches to annotating the transaction entities and their associated relations were investigated, and it was found that it is better to annotate only entities that occur in a relation than annotating all occurrences. Furthermore, the number of PRs needed to achieve a satisfactory result in the IE pipeline was investigated. The study shows that training with about 400 PRs is sufficient for the results to converge, at around 0.85 in F1-score. Finally, the report shows that there is not much difference between a complex RE model and a simple rule-based approach, when applied on the studied corpus.

This thesis aims to develop a Relation Extraction algorithm to extract knowledge out of automotive data. While most approaches to Relation Extraction are only evaluated on newspaper data dealing with general relations from the business world their applicability to other data sets is not well studied. Part I of this thesis deals with theoretical foundations of Information Extraction algorithms. Text mining cannot be seen as the simple application of data mining methods to textual data. Instead, sophisticated methods have to be employed to accurately extract knowledge from text which then can be mined using statistical methods from the field of data mining. Information Extraction itself can be divided into two subtasks: Entity Detection and Relation Extraction. The detection of entities is very domain-dependent due to terminology, abbreviations and general language use within the given domain. Thus, this task has to be solved for each domain employing thesauri or another type of lexicon. Supervised approaches to Named Entity Recognition will not achieve reasonable results unless they have been trained for the given type of data. The task of Relation Extraction can be basically approached by pattern-based and kernel-based algorithms. The latter achieve state-of-the-art results on newspaper data and point out the importance of linguistic features. In order to analyze relations contained in textual data, syntactic features like part-of-speech tags and syntactic parses are essential. Chapter 4 presents machine learning approaches and linguistic foundations being essential for syntactic annotation of textual data and Relation Extraction. Chapter 6 analyzes the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms of POS tagging, syntactic parsing and Relation Extraction on automotive data. The findings are: supervised methods trained on newspaper corpora do not achieve accurate results when being applied on automotive data. This is grounded in various reasons. Besides low-quality text, the nature of automotive relations states the main challenge. Automotive relation types of interest (e. g. component – symptom) are rather arbitrary compared to well-studied relation types like is-a or is-head-of. In order to achieve acceptable results, algorithms have to be trained directly on this kind of data. As the manual annotation of data for each language and data type is too costly and inflexible, unsupervised methods are the ones to rely on. Part II deals with the development of dedicated algorithms for all three essential tasks. Unsupervised POS tagging (Chapter 7) is a well-studied task and algorithms achieving accurate tagging exist. All of them do not disambiguate high frequency words, only out-of-lexicon words are disambiguated. Most high frequency words bear syntactic information and thus, it is very important to differentiate between their different functions. Especially domain languages contain ambiguous and high frequent words bearing semantic information (e. g. pump). In order to improve POS tagging, an algorithm for disambiguation is developed and used to enhance an existing state-of-the-art tagger. This approach is based on context clustering which is used to detect a word type’s different syntactic functions. Evaluation shows that tagging accuracy is raised significantly. An approach to unsupervised syntactic parsing (Chapter 8) is developed in order to suffice the requirements of Relation Extraction. These requirements include high precision results on nominal and prepositional phrases as they contain the entities being relevant for Relation Extraction. Furthermore, accurate shallow parsing is more desirable than deep binary parsing as it facilitates Relation Extraction more than deep parsing. Endocentric and exocentric constructions can be distinguished and improve proper phrase labeling. unsuParse is based on preferred positions of word types within phrases to detect phrase candidates. Iterating the detection of simple phrases successively induces deeper structures. The proposed algorithm fulfills all demanded criteria and achieves competitive results on standard evaluation setups. Syntactic Relation Extraction (Chapter 9) is an approach exploiting syntactic statistics and text characteristics to extract relations between previously annotated entities. The approach is based on entity distributions given in a corpus and thus, provides a possibility to extend text mining processes to new data in an unsupervised manner. Evaluation on two different languages and two different text types of the automotive domain shows that it achieves accurate results on repair order data. Results are less accurate on internet data, but the task of sentiment analysis and extraction of the opinion target can be mastered. Thus, the incorporation of internet data is possible and important as it provides useful insight into the customer\''s thoughts. To conclude, this thesis presents a complete unsupervised workflow for Relation Extraction – except for the highly domain-dependent Entity Detection task – improving performance of each of the involved subtasks compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, this work applies Natural Language Processing methods and Relation Extraction approaches to real world data unveiling challenges that do not occur in high quality newspaper corpora.

Companies do not exist in isolation. They are embedded in structural relationships with each other. Mapping a given company’s relationships with other companies in terms of competitors, subsidiaries, suppliers, and customers are key to understanding a company’s major risk factors and opportunities. Conventionally, obtaining and staying up to date with this key knowledge was achieved by reading financial news and reports by highly skilled manual labor like a financial analyst. However, with the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and graph databases, it is now possible to systematically extract and store structured information from unstructured data sources. The current go-to method to effectively extract information uses supervised machine learning models, which require a large amount of labeled training data. The data labeling process is usually time-consuming and hard to get in a domain-specific area. This project explores an approach to construct a company domain-specific Knowledge Graph (KG) that contains company-related entities and relationships from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 10-K filings by combining a pre-trained general NLP with rule-based patterns in Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE). This approach eliminates the time-consuming data-labeling task in the statistical approach, and by evaluating ten 10-k filings, the model has the overall Recall of 53.6%, Precision of 75.7%, and the F1-score of 62.8%. The result shows it is possible to extract company information using the hybrid methods, which does not require a large amount of labeled training data. However, the project requires the time-consuming process of finding lexical patterns from sentences to extract company-related entities and relationships. / Företag existerar inte som isolerade organisationer. De är inbäddade i strukturella relationer med varandra. Att kartlägga ett visst företags relationer med andra företag när det gäller konkurrenter, dotterbolag, leverantörer och kunder är nyckeln till att förstå företagets huvudsakliga riskfaktorer och möjligheter. Det konventionella sättet att hålla sig uppdaterad med denna viktiga kunskap var genom att läsa ekonomiska nyheter och rapporter från högkvalificerad manuell arbetskraft som till exempel en finansanalytiker. Men med utvecklingen av ”Natural Language Processing” (NLP) och grafdatabaser är det nu möjligt att systematiskt extrahera och lagra strukturerad information från ostrukturerade datakällor. Den nuvarande metoden för att effektivt extrahera information använder övervakade maskininlärningsmodeller som kräver en stor mängd märkta träningsdata. Datamärkningsprocessen är vanligtvis tidskrävande och svår att få i ett domänspecifikt område. Detta projekt utforskar ett tillvägagångssätt för att konstruera en företagsdomänspecifikt ”Knowledge Graph” (KG) som innehåller företagsrelaterade enheter och relationer från SEC 10-K-arkivering genom att kombinera en i förväg tränad allmän NLP med regelbaserade mönster i ”Named Entity Recognition” (NER) och ”Relation Extraction” (RE). Detta tillvägagångssätt eliminerar den tidskrävande datamärkningsuppgiften i det statistiska tillvägagångssättet och genom att utvärdera tio SEC 10-K arkiv har modellen den totala återkallelsen på 53,6 %, precision på 75,7 % och F1-poängen på 62,8 %. Resultatet visar att det är möjligt att extrahera företagsinformation med hybridmetoderna, vilket inte kräver en stor mängd märkta träningsdata. Projektet kräver dock en tidskrävande process för att hitta lexikala mönster från meningar för att extrahera företagsrelaterade enheter och relationer.

[pt] As técnicas de processamento de linguagem natural (NLP) estão se tornando populares recentemente. A gama de aplicativos que se beneficiam de NLP é extensa, desde criar sistemas de tradução automática até ajudar no marketing de um produto. Dentro de NLP, o campo de Extração de Informações (IE) é difundido; concentra-se no processamento de textos para recuperar informações específicas sobre uma determinada entidade ou conceito. Ainda assim, a comunidade de pesquisa se concentra principalmente na construção de modelos para dados na língua inglesa. Esta tese aborda três tarefas no domínio do IE: Reconhecimento de Entidade Nomeada, Extração de Relações Semânticas e Extração Conjunta de Entidade e Relação. Primeiro, criamos um novo conjunto de dados em português no domínio biomédico, descrevemos o processo de anotação e medimos suas propriedades. Além disso, desenvolvemos um novo modelo para a tarefa de Extração Conjunta de Entidade e Relação, verificando que o mesmo é competitivo em comparação com outros modelos. Finalmente, avaliamos cuidadosamente os modelos propostos em textos de idiomas diferentes do inglês e confirmamos a dominância de modelos baseados em redes neurais. / [en] Natural language processing (NLP) techniques are becoming popular recently. The range of applications that benefit from NLP is extensive, from building machine translation systems to helping market a product. Within NLP, the Information Extraction (IE) field is widespread; it focuses on processing texts to retrieve specific information about a particular entity or concept. Still, the research community mainly focuses on building models for English data. This thesis addresses three tasks in the IE domain: Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, and Joint Entity and Relation Extraction. First, we created a novel Portuguese dataset in the biomedical domain, described the annotation process, and measured its properties. Also, we developed a novel model for the Joint Entity and Relation Extraction task, verifying that it is competitive compared to other models. Finally, we carefully evaluated proposed models on non-English language datasets and confirmed the dominance of neural-based models.