Events Calendar

PhD Defense - Niloofar Montazeri

Title: Building a Knowledgebase for Deep Lexical Semantics
PhD Candidate: Niloofar Montazeri
Date / Time: Jan 19th (Tuesday), 4:45-6:45 pm
Place: SAL 213

Abstract:
Words describe the world, so if we are going to draw the appropriate inferences in understanding a text, we must have a prior explication of how we view the world (world knowledge) and how words and phrases map to this view (lexical semantics knowledge).
Existing world knowledge and lexical semantics knowledge resources are not particularly suitable for deep reasoning, either due to lack of connection between their elements or due to their simple knowledge representation method (binary relations between natural language phrases).
To enable deep understanding and reasoning over natural language, (Hobbs 2008) has proposed the idea of "Deep Lexical Semantics". In Deep Lexical Semantics, principal and abstract domains of commonsense knowledge are encoded into "core theories" and words are linked to these theories through axioms that use predicates from these theories. This research is concerned with the second task: Axiomatizing words in terms of predicates in core theories.
We show that a large scale lexical semantics knowledgebase for a given domain can be developed by dividing the authoring task using the optimum mix of manual and automatic methods. We use concept relations in existing lexical semantics resources to systematically identify the optimum set of concepts that need to be axiomatized manually and axiomatize a large number of relevant concepts automatically. We have used this method to axiomatize concepts related to the domain of composite entities and evaluated the quality of the resulting axioms. Furthermore, we have evaluated the usefulness of these axioms on the well-studied task of extracting part-of relations from text.

Committee:
Prof. Jerry R. Hobbs (Chair)
Prof. Kevin Knight
Prof. Andrew Gordon
Prof. Elsi Kaiser (External Member)

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Lizsl De Leon