Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 11, 2010

Semantic Drift: An RDF Answer (sort-of)

Filed under: RDF,Semantic Web,Subject Identity — Patrick Durusau @ 7:27 am

As promised last week, there are RDF researchers working on issues related to semantic drift.

An interesting approach can be found in: Entity Reference Resolution via Spreading Activation on RDF-Graphs Authors(s): Joachim Kleb, Andreas Abecker

Abstract:

The use of natural language identifiers as reference for ontology elements—in addition to the URIs required by the Semantic Web standards—is of utmost importance because of their predominance in the human everyday life, i.e.speech or print media. Depending on the context, different names can be chosen for one and the same element, and the same element can be referenced by different names. Here homonymy and synonymy are the main cause of ambiguity in perceiving which concrete unique ontology element ought to be referenced by a specific natural language identifier describing an entity. We propose a novel method to resolve entity references under the aspect of ambiguity which explores only formal background knowledge represented in RDF graph structures. The key idea of our domain independent approach is to build an entity network with the most likely referenced ontology elements by constructing steiner graphs based on spreading activation. In addition to exploiting complex graph structures, we devise a new ranking technique that characterises the likelihood of entities in this network, i.e. interpretation contexts. Experiments in a highly polysemic domain show the ability of the algorithm to retrieve the correct ontology elements in almost all cases.

It is the situating of a concept in a context (not assignment of a URI) that enables the correct result in a polysemic domain.

This doesn’t directly model semantic drift but does represent anchoring a term in a particular context.

The questions that divides semantic technologies are:

  • Who throws the anchor?
  • Who governs the anchors?
  • Can there be more than one anchor?
  • What about “my” anchor?
  • …and others

More on those anon.

1 Comment

  1. […] Kelb reports approximately 48% precision. […]

    Pingback by Semantic Drift: What Are Linked Data/RDF and TMDM Topic Maps Missing? « Another Word For It — October 13, 2010 @ 9:38 am

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