Táto práca sa zaoberá automatickým viacjazyčným zodpovedaním na otázky v otvorenej doméne. V tejto práci sú navrhnuté prístupy k tejto málo prebádanej doméne. Konkrétne skúma, či: (i) použitie prekladu z angličtiny je dostačujúce, (ii) multilinguálne systémy vedia využiť preklad otázky do iných jazykov (iii) alebo je výhodnejšie nepoužívať žiaden preklad. Porovnávam použitie anglického systému založeného na modeli T5, ktorý využíva strojový preklad s natívne viacjazyčnými systémami založenými na viacjazyčnom modeli MT5. Anglický systém so strojovým prekladom mierne prekonáva svoje jednojazyčné náprotivky vo viacerých úlohách. Napriek tomu, že tento model bol natrénovaný na väčšom množstve dát zlepšenie nie je dostatočne signifikantné. To ukazuje, že použitie natívne viacjazyčných systémov je sľubným prístupom pre budúci výskum. Tiež prezentujem metódu získavania dokumentov v rôznych jazykoch pomocou algoritmu BM25 a porovnávam ju s anglickým retrievalom. Používanie viacjazyčných dôkazov sa javí ako prospešné a zlepšuje výkonnosť systému systémov.

Probabilistic data and knowledge bases are becoming increasingly important in academia and industry. They are continuously extended with new data, powered by modern information extraction tools that associate probabilities with knowledge base facts. The state of the art to store and process such data is founded on probabilistic database systems, which are widely and successfully employed. Beyond all the success stories, however, such systems still lack the fundamental machinery to convey some of the valuable knowledge hidden in them to the end user, which limits their potential applications in practice. In particular, in their classical form, such systems are typically based on strong, unrealistic limitations, such as the closed-world assumption, the closed-domain assumption, the tuple-independence assumption, and the lack of commonsense knowledge. These limitations do not only lead to unwanted consequences, but also put such systems on weak footing in important tasks, querying answering being a very central one. In this thesis, we enhance probabilistic data and knowledge bases with more realistic data models, thereby allowing for better means for querying them. Building on the long endeavor of unifying logic and probability, we develop different rigorous semantics for probabilistic data and knowledge bases, analyze their computational properties and identify sources of (in)tractability and design practical scalable query answering algorithms whenever possible. To achieve this, the current work brings together some recent paradigms from logics, probabilistic inference, and database theory.

In this thesis, we study the notion of graph summarization, which is a fundamental task of finding a compact representation of the original graph called the summary. Graph summarization can be used for reducing the footprint of the input graph, better visualization, anonymizing the identity of users, and query answering. There are two different frameworks of graph summarization we consider in this thesis, the utility-based framework and the correction set-based framework. In the utility-based framework, the input graph is summarized until a utility threshold is not violated. In the correction set-based framework a set of correction edges is produced along with the summary graph. In this thesis we propose two algorithms for the utility-based framework and one for the correction set-based framework. All these three algorithms are for static graphs (i.e. graphs that do not change over time). Then, we propose two more utility-based algorithms for fully dynamic graphs (i.e. graphs with edge insertions and deletions). Algorithms for graph summarization can be lossless (summarizing the input graph without losing any information) or lossy (losing some information about the input graph in order to summarize it more). Some of our algorithms are lossless and some lossy, but with controlled utility loss. Our first utility-driven graph summarization algorithm, G-SCIS, is based on a clique and independent set decomposition, that produces optimal compression with zero loss of utility. The compression provided is significantly better than state-of-the-art in lossless graph summarization, while the runtime is two orders of magnitude lower. Our second algorithm is T-BUDS, a highly scalable, utility-driven algorithm for fully controlled lossy summarization. It achieves high scalability by combining memory reduction using Maximum Spanning Tree with a novel binary search procedure. T-BUDS outperforms state-of-the-art drastically in terms of the quality of summarization and is about two orders of magnitude better in terms of speed. In contrast to the competition, we are able to handle web-scale graphs in a single machine without performance impediment as the utility threshold (and size of summary) decreases. Also, we show that our graph summaries can be used as-is to answer several important classes of queries, such as triangle enumeration, Pagerank and shortest paths. We then propose algorithm LDME, a correction set-based graph summarization algorithm that produces compact output representations in a fast and scalable manner. To achieve this, we introduce (1) weighted locality sensitive hashing to drastically reduce the number of comparisons required to find good node merges, (2) an efficient way to compute the best quality merges that produces more compact outputs, and (3) a new sort-based encoding algorithm that is faster and more robust. More interestingly, our algorithm provides performance tuning settings to allow the option of trading compression for running time. On high compression settings, LDME achieves compression equal to or better than the state of the art with up to 53x speedup in running time. On high speed settings, LDME achieves up to two orders of magnitude speedup with only slightly lower compression. We also present two lossless summarization algorithms, Optimal and Scalable, for summarizing fully dynamic graphs. More concretely, we follow the framework of G-SCIS, which produces summaries that can be used as-is in several graph analytics tasks. Different from G-SCIS, which is a batch algorithm, Optimal and Scalable are fully dynamic and can respond rapidly to each change in the graph. Not only are Optimal and Scalable able to outperform G-SCIS and other batch algorithms by several orders of magnitude, but they also significantly outperform MoSSo, the state-of-the-art in lossless dynamic graph summarization. While Optimal produces always the most optimal summary, Scalable is able to trade the amount of node reduction for extra scalability. For reasonable values of the parameter $K$, Scalable is able to outperform Optimal by an order of magnitude in speed, while keeping the rate of node reduction close to that of Optimal. An interesting fact that we observed experimentally is that even if we were to run a batch algorithm, such as G-SCIS, once for every big batch of changes, still they would be much slower than Scalable. For instance, if 1 million changes occur in a graph, Scalable is two orders of magnitude faster than running G-SCIS just once at the end of the 1 million-edge sequence. / Graduate

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) have brought the promise of many applications along with many challenges to solve. The majority of current AI research has been dedicated to single-modal data processing meaning they use only one modality such as visual recognition or text recognition. However, real-world challenges are often a combination of different modalities of data such as text, audio and images. This thesis focuses on solving the Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem which is a significant multi-modal challenge. VQA is defined as a computer vision system that when given a question about an image will answer based on an understanding of both the question and image. The goal is improving the training time of VQA models. In this thesis, Look, Read, Reason and Answer (LoRRA), which is a state-of-the-art architecture, is used as the base model. Then, Reduce Uni-modal Biases (RUBi) is applied to this model to reduce the importance of uni- modal biases in training. Finally, an early stopping strategy is employed to stop the training process once the model accuracy has converged to prevent the model from overfitting. Numerical results are presented which show that training LoRRA with RUBi and early stopping can converge in less than 5 hours. The impact of batch size, learning rate and warm up hyper parameters is also investigated and experimental results are presented. / Graduate

[pt] A resposta de uma consulta, submetida a um banco de dados ou base de conhecimento, geralmente é longa e pode conter dados redundantes. O usuário é frequentemente forçado a navegar por uma longa resposta, ou refinar e repetir a consulta até que a resposta atinja um tamanho gerenciável. Sem o tratamento adequado, consumir a resposta da consulta pode se tornar uma tarefa tediosa. Este estudo, então, propõe um processo que modifica a apresentação da resposta da consulta para melhorar a qualidade de experiência do usuário, no contexto de uma base de conhecimento RDF. O processo reorganiza a resposta da consulta original aplicando heurísticas para comprimir os resultados. A consulta SPARQL original é modificada e uma exploração sobre o conjunto de resultados começa através de uma navegação guiada sobre predicados e suas facetas. O artigo também inclui experimentos baseados em versões RDF do MusicBrainz, enriquecido com dados do DBpedia, e IMDb, cada um com mais de 200 milhões de triplas RDF. Os experimentos utilizam exemplos de consultas de benchmarks conhecidos. / [en] The answer of a query, submitted to a database or a knowledge base, is often long and may contain redundant data. The user is frequently forced to browse thru a long answer, or to refine and repeat the query until the answer reaches a manageable size. Without proper treatment, consuming the query answer may indeed become a tedious task. This study then proposes a process that modifies the presentation of a query answer to improve the quality of the user s experience, in the context of an RDF knowledge base. The process reorganizes the original query answer by applying heuristics to summarize the results. The original SPARQL query is modified and an exploration over the result set starts thru a guided navigation over predicates and its facets. The article also includes experiments based on RDF versions of MusicBrainz, enriched with DBpedia data, and IMDb, each with over 200 million RDF triples. The experiments use sample queries from well-known benchmarks.

Question Answering systems are greatly sought after in many areas of industry. Unfortunately, as most research in Natural Language Processing is conducted in English, the applicability of such systems to other languages is limited. Moreover, these systems often struggle in dealing with long text sequences. This thesis explores the possibility of applying existing models to the Swedish language, in a domain where the syntax and semantics differ greatly from typical Swedish texts. Additionally, the text length may vary arbitrarily. To solve these problems, transfer learning techniques and state-of-the-art Question Answering models are investigated. Furthermore, a novel, divide-and-conquer based technique for processing long texts is developed. Results show that the transfer learning is partly unsuccessful, but the system is capable of perform reasonably well in the new domain regardless. Furthermore, the system shows great performance improvement on longer text sequences with the use of the new technique. / System som givet en text besvarar frågor är högt eftertraktade inom många arbetsområden. Eftersom majoriteten av all forskning inom naturligtspråkbehandling behandlar engelsk text är de flesta system inte direkt applicerbara på andra språk. Utöver detta har systemen ofta svårt att hantera långa textsekvenser. Denna rapport utforskar möjligheten att applicera existerande modeller på det svenska språket, i en domän där syntaxen och semantiken i språket skiljer sig starkt från typiska svenska texter. Dessutom kan längden på texterna variera godtyckligt. För att lösa dessa problem undersöks flera tekniker inom transferinlärning och frågebesvarande modeller i forskningsfronten. En ny metod för att behandla långa texter utvecklas, baserad på en dekompositionsalgoritm. Resultaten visar på att transfer learning delvis misslyckas givet domänen och modellerna, men att systemet ändå presterar relativt väl i den nya domänen. Utöver detta visas att systemet presterar väl på långa texter med hjälp av den nya metoden.

A strong capability of large language models is Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Prompting a model to ‘think step-by-step’ has led to great performance improvements in solving problems such as planning and question answering, and with the extended output it provides some evidence about the rationale behind an answer or decision. In search of better, more robust, and interpretable language model behavior, this work investigates self-reflection in large language models. Here, self-reflection consists of feedback from large language models to medical question-answering and whether the feedback can be used to accurately distinguish between correct and incorrect answers. GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 provide zero-shot feedback scores to Chain-of-Thought reasoning on the MedQA (medical questionanswering) dataset. The question-answering is evaluated on traits such as being structured, relevant and consistent. We test whether the feedback scores are different for questions that were either correctly or incorrectly answered by Chain-of-Thought reasoning. The potential differences in feedback scores are statistically tested with the Mann-Whitney U test. Graphical visualization and logistic regressions are performed to preliminarily determine whether the feedback scores are indicative to whether the Chain-of-Thought reasoning leads to the right answer. The results indicate that among the reasoning objectives, the feedback models assign higher feedback scores to questions that were answered correctly than those that were answered incorrectly. Graphical visualization shows potential for reviewing questions with low feedback scores, although logistic regressions that aimed to predict whether or not questions were answered correctly mostly defaulted to the majority class. Nonetheless, there seems to be a possibility for more robust output from self-reflecting language systems. / En stark förmåga hos stora språkmodeller är Chain-of-Thought-resonerande. Att prompta en modell att tänka stegvis har lett till stora prestandaförbättringar vid lösandet av problem som planering och frågebesvarande, och med den utökade outputen ger det en del bevis rörande logiken bakom ett svar eller beslut. I sökandet efter bättre, mer robust och tolk bart beteende hos språkmodeller undersöker detta arbete självreflektion i stora språkmodeller. Forskningsfrågan är: I vilken utsträckning kan feedback från stora språkmodeller, såsom GPT-3.5-Turbo och GPT-4, på ett korrekt sätt skilja mellan korrekta och inkorrekta svar i medicinska frågebesvarande uppgifter genom användningen av Chainof-Thought-resonerande? Här ger GPT-3.5-Turbo och GPT-4 zero-shot feedback-poäng till Chain-ofThought-resonerande på datasetet för MedQA (medicinskt frågebesvarande). Frågebesvarandet bör vara strukturerat, relevant och konsekvent. Feedbackpoängen jämförs mellan två grupper av frågor, baserat på om dessa besvarades korrekt eller felaktigt i första hand. Statistisk testning genomförs på skillnaden i feedback-poäng med Mann-Whitney U-testet. Grafisk visualisering och logistiska regressioner utförs för att preliminärt avgöra om feedbackpoängen är indikativa för huruvida Chainof-Thought-resonerande leder till rätt svar. Resultaten indikerar att bland resonemangsmålen tilldelar feedbackmodellerna fler positiva feedbackpoäng till frågor som besvarats korrekt än de som besvarats felaktigt. Grafisk visualisering visar potential för granskandet av frågor med låga feedbackpoäng, även om logistiska regressioner som syftade till att förutsäga om frågorna besvarades korrekt eller inte för det mesta majoritetsklassen. Icke desto mindre verkar det finnas potential för robustare från självreflekterande språksystem.

Open Domain Question Answering (OpenQA) is a task concerning automatically finding answers to a query from a given set of documents. Language-agnostic OpenQA is an increasingly important research area in the globalised world, where the answers can be in a different language from the question. An OpenQA system generally consists of a document retriever to retrieve relevant passages and a reader to extract answers from the passages. Large Transformers, such as Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) models, have achieved state-of-the-art performances in document retrievals, but they are computationally expensive in production. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is an effective way to reduce the size and increase the speed of Transformers while retaining their performances. However, most existing research focuses on distilling single Transformer models, instead of multi-Transformer models, as in the case of DPR. This thesis project uses MiniLM and DistilBERT distillation methods, two of the most successful methods to distil the BERT model, to individually distil the passage and query model of a fined-tuned DPR model comprised of two pretrained MPNet models. In addition, the project proposes and tests Embedding Similarity Loss (ESL), a distillation loss designed for the interaction between the passage and query models in DPR architecture. The results show that using ESL results in better students than using MiniLM or DistilBERT loss alone and that combining ESL with any of the other two losses increases their student models’ performances in most cases, especially when training on Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages (TyDi QA) instead of The Stanford Question Answering Dataset 1.1 (SQuAD 1.1). The best resulting 6-layer student DPR model retained more than 90% of the recall and Mean Average Precision (MAP) in Cross-Lingual Transfer (XLT) tasks while reducing the inference time to 63.2%. In Generalised Cross-Lingual Transfer (G-XLT) tasks, it retained only around 42% of the recall and MAP using 53.8% of the inference time. / Domänlöst frågebesvarande är en uppgift som handlar om att automatiskt hitta svar på en fråga från en given uppsättning av dokument. Språkagnostiska domänlöst frågebesvarande är ett allt viktigare forskningsområde i den globaliserade världen, där svaren kan vara på ett annat språk än själva frågan. Ett domänlöst frågebesvarande-system består i allmänhet av en dokumenthämtare som plockar relevanta textavsnitt och en läsare som extraherar svaren från dessa textavsnitt. Stora transformatorer, såsom DPR-modeller (Dense Passage Retrieval), har uppnått toppresultat i dokumenthämtning, men de är beräkningsmässigt dyra i produktion. KD (Knowledge Distillation) är ett effektivt sätt att minska storleken och öka hastigheten hos transformatorer samtidigt som deras prestanda bibehålls. För det mesta är den existerande forskningen dock inriktad på att destillera enstaka transformatormodeller i stället för modeller med flera transformatorer, som i fallet med DPR. I det här examensarbetet används MiniLM- och DistilBERT-destilleringsmetoderna, två av de mest framgångsrika metoderna för att destillera BERT-modellen, för att individuellt destillera text- och frågemodellen i en finjusterad DPRmodell som består av två förinlärda MPNet-modeller. Dessutom föreslås och testas ESL (Embedding Similarity Loss), en destilleringsförlust som är utformad för interaktionen mellan text- och frågemodellerna i DPRarkitekturen. Resultaten visar att användning av ESL resulterar i bättre studenter än om man enbart använder MiniLM eller DistilBERT-förlusten och att kombinationen ESL med någon av de andra två förlusterna ökar deras studentmodellers prestanda i de flesta fall, särskilt när man tränar på TyDi QA (Typologically Diverse Languages) istället för SQuAD 1.1 (The Stanford Question Answering Dataset). Den bästa resulterande 6-lagriga student DPRmodellen behöll mer än 90% av återkallandet och MAP (Mean Average Precision) för XLT-uppgifterna (Cross-Lingual Transfer) samtidigt som tiden för inferens minskades till 63.2%. För G-XLT-uppgifterna (Generalised CrossLingual Transfer) bibehölls endast cirka 42% av återkallelsen och MAP med 53.8% av inferenstiden.

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