INF250a

CSI5180: Special Topics in Artificial Intelligence: Knowledge Extraction for the Semantic Web

Prof. Amal Zouaq

Office: STE 5062

Course Description

The Semantic Web objective is to make Web content automatically processable by machines on a large scale, thus enabling various applications and Web services useful in the corporate and research contexts. The success of Semantic Web technologies is currently concretized by a) the development of knowledge graphs used by search engines such as Google or Bing; b) the emergence of the Linked Open Data Cloud; and c) the development of services and mashups for information retrieval, semantic annotation, data integration and fusion, to name a few.

In this graduate course, the first part of the lectures will introduce Semantic Web technologies (RDF, RDFS and OWL) and the Linked Open Data Cloud. You will learn to develop data models in RDF and more expressive ontologies in OWL and to use automatic reasoning engines to deduce new knowledge. In the second part of the course, we will focus on current Semantic Web challenges, particularly in terms of knowledge extraction from unstructured content. We will introduce techniques for ontology learning from texts and semantic annotation, two hot topics in both academia and industry.

The course will take the form of formal lectures and seminar presentations (given by students and potentially invited speakers). Another learning activity will consist in reading and discussing research papers introducing the latest techniques in knowledge extraction and machine learning for the Semantic Web. A course project will also allow you to implement a solution that targets one of the Semantic Web challenges, with an emphasis on knowledge extraction and machine learning techniques. This course is collaborative in the sense that your active participation will help ensure intellectually challenging discussions.

Links

https://www.google.com/intl/es419/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html

https://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html

https://www.programmableweb.com/news/111-semantic-apis-musicbrainz-calais-and-dbpedia/2012/06/13

http://lod-cloud.net/

https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/natural-language-understanding.html

https://alchemy-language-demo.mybluemix.net/