Formal Representation Research Articles

Report on the third international workshop on narrative extraction from texts (Text2Story 2020)

The Third International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story'20 [https://text2story20.inesctec.pt/]) was held on the 14th of April 2020, in conjunction with the 42 nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2020). This year due to the Covid-19 outbreak the Text2Story workshop was held online on Zoom platform. During the course of the day, an average of more than 60 attendees had the opportunity to follow-up and discuss the recent advances in extraction and formal representation of narratives. The workshop consisted of two invited keynotes and thirteen paper presentations. The proceedings of the workshop are available online at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2593/

A Semantic Focused Web Crawler Based on a Knowledge Representation Schema

The Web has become the main source of information in the digital world, expanding to heterogeneous domains and continuously growing. By means of a search engine, users can systematically search over the web for particular information based on a text query, on the basis of a domain-unaware web search tool that maintains real-time information. One type of web search tool is the semantic focused web crawler (SFWC); it exploits the semantics of the Web based on some ontology heuristics to determine which web pages belong to the domain defined by the query. An SFWC is highly dependent on the ontological resource, which is created by domain human experts. This work presents a novel SFWC based on a generic knowledge representation schema to model the crawler’s domain, thus reducing the complexity and cost of constructing a more formal representation as the case when using ontologies. Furthermore, a similarity measure based on the combination of the inverse document frequency (IDF) metric, standard deviation, and the arithmetic mean is proposed for the SFWC. This measure filters web page contents in accordance with the domain of interest during the crawling task. A set of experiments were run over the domains of computer science, politics, and diabetes to validate and evaluate the proposed novel crawler. The quantitative (harvest ratio) and qualitative (Fleiss’ kappa) evaluations demonstrate the suitability of the proposed SFWC to crawl the Web using a knowledge representation schema instead of a domain ontology.

Knowledge Geometry in Phenomenon Perception and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) pervades industry, entertainment, transportation, finance, and health. It seems to be in a kind of golden age, but today AI is based on the strength of techniques that bear little relation to the thought mechanism. Contemporary techniques of machine learning, deep learning and case-based reasoning seem to be occupied with delivering functional and optimized solutions, leaving aside the core reasons of why such solutions work. This paper, in turn, proposes a theoretical study of perception, a key issue for knowledge acquisition and intelligence construction. Its main concern is the formal representation of a perceived phenomenon by a casual observer and its relationship with machine intelligence. This work is based on recently proposed geometric theory, and represents an approach that is able to describe the inuence of scope, development paradigms, matching process and ground truth on phenomenon perception. As a result, it enumerates the perception variables and describes the implications for AI.

Control over maintaining accuracy of integrity of reference surfaces of spacecraft components in their joint functioning at various stages of design

The paper deals with ensuring the accuracy of integrity of spacecraft components reference surfaces at various stages of design. It is shown that the main problem consists in the fact that the accuracy of integrity of the reference surfaces of the components making up the complex is maintained in the framework of the internal structure of a part. We propose a method of control over ensuring the accuracy of integrity of spacecraft components reference surfaces at various stages of design in the framework of their external structures. The method is implemented by introducing the coordinate system of the complex into the scheme of the complex of components that perform interrelated service functions. Concepts and definitions are introduced in the framework of the method that make possible formal representation of accuracy of integrity of the components reference surfaces in the form of a set of pairs of points the appropriate annotated dimensions are fixed on. Graphical interpretation of the method at the stages of development of technical requirements for the components is presented. An example of potential implementation of the method at the stage of design documentation development is given.

A constraint and risk-aware approach to attribute-based access control for cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) integrate cyber components and physical processes. This integration enhances the capabilities of physical systems by incorporating intelligence into objects and services. On the other hand, the integration of cyber and physical components and the interaction between them introduce new security threats. Since CPSs are mostly safety-critical systems, data stored and communicated in them are highly critical. Hence, there is a crucial need for protecting the data and resources in CPSs against unauthorized accesses. In this paper, we propose an access control (AC) framework to address CPS related security issues. The proposed framework consists of two parts: a Cyber-Physical Access Control model (CPAC) and a Generalized Action Generation Model (GAGM). CPAC utilizes an attribute-based approach and extends it with cyber-physical components and cyber-physical interactions. In addition, we incorporate Separation of Duty (SoD) constraints into the CPAC model. GAGM is used to augment the enforcement of access policies. We present formal representations of CPAC and GAGM and demonstrate their use in a sample scenario for a medical CPS. We propose an algorithm for enforcing authorization policies. We implement the CPAC model and compare its performance against the core attribute-based access control model. We present an authorization enforcement approach and show through our experimental results its feasibility.

On the use of semantic technologies for video analytics

The rapid proliferation of smart devices, surveillance cameras, infrastructures and buildings enhanced with the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has led to a huge explosion of contents, especially in the video domain, determining an ever increasing interest towards the development of methods and tools for automatic analysis and interpretation of video sequences. Through the years, the availability of contextual knowledge has proven to improve video analysis performances in several ways, although the formal representation of semantic content in a shareable and fusion oriented manner is still an open problem, also considering the wide diffusion of Fog and Edge computing architectures for video analytics lately. In this context, an interesting answer has come from Semantic Web (SW) technologies, that opened a new perspective for the so-called Knowledge Based Computer Vision (KBCV), adding novel analytics opportunities, improving accuracy, and facilitating data exchange between video analysis systems in an open extensible manner. In this work, we propose a survey of the papers from the last eighteen years, back when first applications of semantic technologies to video analytics have appeared. The papers, analyzed under different perspectives to give a comprehensive overview of the technologies involved, reveal an interesting trend towards the adoption of SW technologies for video analytics scopes. As a result of our work, some insights about future challenges are also provided.

Which Prior Mathematical Knowledge Is Necessary for Study Success in the University Study Entrance Phase? Results on a New Model of Knowledge Levels Based on a Reanalysis of Data from Existing Studies

The transition from school to tertiary mathematics courses, which involve advanced mathematics, is a challenge for many students. Prior research has established the central role of prior mathematical knowledge for successfully dealing with challenges in learning processes during the study entrance phase. However, beyond knowing that more prior knowledge is beneficial for study success, especially passing courses, it is not yet known how a level of prior knowledge can be characterized that is sufficient for a successful start into a mathematics program. The aim of this contribution is to specify the appropriate level of mathematical knowledge that predicts study success in the first semester. Based on theoretical analysis of the demands in tertiary mathematics courses, we develop a mathematical test with 17 items in the domain of Analysis. Thereby, we focus on different levels of conceptual understanding by linking between different (in)formal representation formats and different levels of mathematical argumentations. The empirical results are based on a re-analysis of five studies in which in sum 1553 students of bachelor mathematics and mathematics teacher education programs deal with some of these items in each case. By identifying four levels of knowledge, we indicate that linking multiple representations is an important skill at the study entrance phase. With these levels of knowledge, it might be possible to identify students at risk of failing. So, the findings could contribute to more precise study advice and support before and while studying advanced mathematics at university.

School Performance Measurement Based on Business Architecture

School performance measurement is the process of collecting, processing, analyzing and interpreting data about the quality of work carried out by school members in carrying out their main tasks and roles. Measuring the performance of an organization will encourage the achievement of objectives in the organization. A performance measurement system must be built so that the information obtained is as much and as accurate as possible. Business architecture is a formal representation and tools as well as information for business professionals in assessing, changing and designing a business. Business modeling will show the relationship of organizational behavior with the information needed, and the relationships that occur within the organizational structure, so that business architecture is the main thing that must be completely defined before continuing on to the next stage. To encourage schools to achieve goals and design business strategies that are in line with the objectives, this research will propose a system for measuring school performance based on business architecture.

Learning Description Logic Ontologies: Five Approaches. Where Do They Stand?

The quest for acquiring a formal representation of the knowledge of a domain of interest has attracted researchers with various backgrounds into a diverse field called ontology learning. We highlight classical machine learning and data mining approaches that have been proposed for (semi-)automating the creation of description logic (DL) ontologies. These are based on association rule mining, formal concept analysis, inductive logic programming, computational learning theory, and neural networks. We provide an overview of each approach and how it has been adapted for dealing with DL ontologies. Finally, we discuss the benefits and limitations of each of them for learning DL ontologies.

Assessment of the uneven use of information resources in the business process circuit

An approach is proposed for assessing the uneven use of information resources in the organization’s business processes. Formal representations of the organization’s business processes and security systems are presented, reflecting both business operations carried out in a certain sequence and information resources that ensure the implementation of the relevant business operations, the place of information resources in the general outline of business processes is indicated. The circuits of the security system business processes of and the business processes of the main object of modeling are considered, including both business processes for managing security and business processes for ensuring security management. The assessment of the non-uniform use of information resources in a business process scheme is based on the consistent construction of an information resource incidence matrix for individual business operations, a frequency relationship matrix reflecting the sharing of information resources, and a matrix of derivatives in a discrete formulation. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a conditional example containing both the notional costs of information resources and weighting factors of the importance of business operations that reflect their criticality in the general contour of business processes. Estimates obtained as a result of applying the approach make it possible to group information resources, focusing on the frequency of their joint use in the business processes, which ultimately makes it possible to justify the choice of information resources for protection against threats from cyber intruders.

Rethinking the Black Box in Architecture Design Studio

Design as a critical action can be defined as a concrete-utilitarian construction process and a state-related symbolic ritual. The process of design is defined by the abstraction area, which is accompanied by abstract forms of representation for the physical environment in a built environment and the response to problems. Black Box is defined as tool, system, or object that in art and science is evaluated by inputs and outputs and does not include any internal information. The Black Box problem, which is part of the architectural design process, has been reconstructed as a critical stance to the closed and implicit architectural production process, supporting open thought to the end but formally designing houses that remain faithful to this black box. Hence, this article is an example of a physical and semantic representation production with an emphasis on design as a critical action and metaphor. This article, which presents the black box problem through a theoretical perspective and architectural design studio examples, focuses on the semantic and formal representation of all conditions of a cube. This aspect aims to provide a creative cross section from the potential of infinite design.

BIM-based immersive Virtual Reality for construction workspace planning: A safety-oriented approach

Effective workspace planning is known to play a crucial role in site planning and construction activity scheduling. This research seeks to enhance the usual manual workspace planning process by simulating a construction activity using both immersive Virtual Reality and Building Information Modeling technologies. Workspace planning is improved by eliciting experienced workers' knowledge and integrating it with construction managers' knowledge. The workers' knowledge is elicited both directly, by asking them for feedback during the activity simulation, and indirectly, by collecting and analysing position tracking data. The application of this approach in a real case study demonstrates its beneficial impact in terms of the sharing of planning and safety-related information between project partners and its formal representation in a Health and Safety Plan.

OPAL: An extensible framework for ontology‐based program analysis

SummaryThe syntactic information of a program can be represented as resource description framework (RDF) triples called program triples. We propose an extensible static analysis framework, called OPAL—Ontology‐based Program AnaLysis. The framework enables formal representation of external knowledge, such as usage knowledge of libraries and domain knowledge. Utilizing this knowledge and the program triples, we compute the semantic information, called static trace of the program. It is generated through path‐sensitive intraprocedural traversal of the program. We approximate information in case of loops by unrolling them a fixed number of times. The main contribution of the framework is to store the static trace as RDF triples called semantic triples. They are described using the Program Analysis ontology proposed in this article. The program triples and the semantic triples are together called consolidated program triples. These triples are stored and used to accelerate the execution of client‐analyses specified by the end user. In the framework, a client‐analysis is specified by a set of conjunctive expressions that use SPARQL (W3C RDF query language) queries. The framework is effective for the client‐analyses that warrant sound and approximate information. The effectiveness is assessed first, using two source‐code‐analyses that require only the program triples, and then 10 intraprocedural path‐sensitive analyses that require the consolidated program triples. Using NPB and SPEC 2006 benchmarks, we achieve an improvement in the conciseness of analysis specifications. Also, the execution time using OPAL is competitive to LLVM's clang for individual analysis and outperforms clang over a series of analyses because of the reuse of consolidated program triples.

Software-physical synergetic design methodology of mechatronic systems based on formal functional models

Mechatronic systems are the synergetic integration of software and physical parts whose characteristics are quite different. The synergistic design of these two parts is one of the main challenges of the system design of mechatronic systems. Although with divergent characteristics, these two parts are possible to be unified on the functional level. Motivated by this observation, a formal functional representation is proposed by extending the flow-based functional representation. On this basis, a system design methodology is proposed, according to which the software and physical parts can be designed separately by applying specific design methods and interactions between the two design processes can be enabled to help designers to identify design defects and constraints in early design. Following this methodology, the traditional reference architecture of mechatronic systems is refactored so that software and physical parts can be correlated in fine granularity. A mobile robot is illustrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

TKRM: A Formal Knowledge Representation Method for Typhoon Events

Typhoon events can cause serious environmental damage and economic losses. Understanding the development of typhoon events will provide valuable knowledge for disaster prevention and mitigation. In the age of big data, the sharp contrast between the sudden increase of mass information and the lack of a knowledge appreciation mechanism appears. There is an urgent need to promote the transformation of information services to knowledge services in the field of hazard management. Knowledge representation, as a strategy for symbolizing and formalizing knowledge, affects knowledge acquisition, storage, management, and application, and is the basis and prerequisite for the implementation of knowledge services. Based on the evolution law of typhoon events and human cognitive habits, a formal knowledge representation method for typhoon events (TKRM) is proposed in this paper. First, by analyzing the evolution characteristics of typhoon events, the TKRM framework with three layers consisting of “event–process–state” was constructed, which was used to describe the knowledge composition and relationship of the different granularity of typhoon events. Second, the formal representation of the TKRM framework was formed by using a finite state machine (FSM) as a reference, taking time and location as the basic conditions, and extending the hierarchical and parallel representation mechanism. Finally, the rationality and practical value of the TKRM were verified using a case study.

An approach based on the ifcOWL ontology to support indoor navigation

This paper presents an indoor navigation support system based on the Building Information Models (BIM) paradigm. Although BIM is initially defined for the Architecture, Engineering and Construction/Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry, the authors believe that it can provide added value in this context. To this end, the authors will focus on the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard for the formal representation of BIM. The approach followed in this paper will be based on the ifcOWL ontology, which translates the IFC schemas into Ontology Web Language (OWL). Several modifications of this ontology have been proposed, consisting of the inclusion of new items, SWRL rules and SQWRL searches. This way of expressing the elements of a building can be used to code information that is very useful for navigation, such as the location of elements related to the actions desired by the user. It is important to note that this design is intended to be used as a complement to other well-known tools and techniques for indoor navigation. The proposed modifications have been successfully tested in a variety of simulated and real scenarios. The main limitation of the proposal is the immense amount of information contained in the ifcOWL ontology, which causes difficulties involving its processing and the time necessary to perform operations on it. Those elements that are considered important have been selected, removing those that seem secondary to navigation. This procedure will result in a significant reduction in the storage and semantic processing of the information. Thus, for a system with 1000 individuals (in the ontological sense), the processing time is about 90 s. The authors regard this time as acceptable, since in most cases the tasks involved can be considered part of the system initialization, meaning they will only be executed once at the beginning of the process.

How can wikipedia be used to support the process of automatically building multilingual domain modules? a case study.

The goal of the research here presented is to identify which aspects of Wikipedia can be exploited to support the process of automatically building Multilingual Domain Modules from textbooks. First, we have defined a representation formalism for Multilingual Domain Modules that is essential for Technology Supported Learning Systems which aim to serve a globalized society. To our knowledge, no attempt has been made at achieving domain models that consider multiple languages. Our approach combines Multilingual Educational Ontologies with Learning Objects in different languages. Wikipedia is a valuable resource to accomplish this purpose. In this scenario, we have developed LiDom Builder, a framework that uses Wikipedia as an additional knowledge base for the automatic generation of Multilingual Domain Modules from textbooks. The framework includes domain-independent term extraction methods to identify which topics of Wikipedia are related to the domain to be learnt and, also, extracts their equivalents in other languages. In order to complete the Educational Ontology, we have defined a method to extract pedagogical relationships from Wikipedia and other general-purpose knowledge bases. From this task, we highlight the extraction of relationship that will allow the sequencing of the topics in Technology Supported Learning Systems. In addition, LiDom Builder takes advantage of the structured contents of Wikipedia to identify text fragments that can be used for educational purposes, classifies them and generates their corresponding Learning Objects. The interlanguage links between topics of Wikipedia are used to create Learning Objects in other languages.

Representation of Space in Russian Culinaronyms from the Perspective of Linguistics

This article tries to represent the category of space in Russian culinaronyms from the perspective of linguistics. The study owns its relevance to thematicity embedded in the culinaronyms and the disclosure of their features through the concept of space. The authors analyze the formal representation of the category of space in the semantic structure of culinaronyms. The results show that the space in Russian culinaronyms is presented implicitly and explicitly, moreover, the space in Russian culinaronyms expresses the following representations: place, space, movement and “zero” place. The purpose of the work is to demonstrate the space-related ideas, to characterize the relationship between cooking and space in the nomination, and to determine linguistic means for expressing the category of space in Russian culinaronyms.

Ontology-based Document Spanning Systems for Information Extraction

Information Extraction (IE) is the task of automatically organizing in a structured form data extracted from free text documents. In several contexts, it is often desirable that the extracted data are then organized according to an ontology, which provides a formal and conceptual representation of the domain of interest. Ontologies allow for a better data interpretation, as well as for their semantic integration with other information, as in Ontology-based Data Access (OBDA), a popular declarative framework for data management where an ontology is connected to a data layer through mappings. However, the data layer considered so far in OBDA has consisted essentially of relational databases, and how to declaratively couple an ontology with unstructured data sources is still unexplored. By leveraging the recent study on document spanners for rule-based IE by Fagin et al., in this paper, we propose a new framework that allows to map text documents to ontologies, in the spirit of OBDA. We investigate the problem of answering conjunctive queries in this framework. For ontologies specified in the Description Logics [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], we show that the problem is polynomial in the size of the underlying documents. We also provide algorithms to solve query answering by rewriting the input query on the basis of the ontology and its mapping toward the source documents. Through these techniques, we pursue a virtual approach, similar to that typically adopted in OBDA, which allows us to answer a query without having to first populate the entire ontology. Interestingly, for [Formula: see text], both the spanners used in the mapping and the one computed by the rewriting algorithm belong to the same class of expressiveness. This holds also for [Formula: see text], modulo some limitations on the form of the mapping. These results say that in these cases our framework can be easily implemented by decoupling ontology management and document access, which can be delegated to an external IE system able to process the extraction rules we use in the mapping.

Speech and Gesture in Forensic Linguistics in Bribery Case: Towards Semantics and Pragmatics of “Closed” Discourses

The paper deals with analysis of verbal and nonverbal information in dialogues about bribes. The dialogue about bribes is one of the types of so called "closed" discourse in which explicit expression of communicative intention is forbidden or at any case legally restricted. Closed discourses are opposed to open ones, in which there are no significant prohibitions on the expression of certain meanings. The restriction on explicit verbalization of bribes leads to contradiction between the need for speakers to express their thoughts clearly, on one hand, and prohibitions of a legal nature – on another. One of the ways to solve this problem is to use non-verbal channels to transfer information – in particular gestures. In dialogues about bribes gesture often replaces and complements speech acts of participants. Examples of interaction between speech of participants of dialogues and their non-verbal behavior are considered. Linguistic semantics and linguistic pragmatics are shown as a metalanguage that allows to transfer sense at the non-verbal level of communication in dialogues about bribes. For this purpose, it is proposed to use metalanguages of non-verbal semiotics and the formal representation of the plot, based on the narrative grammars. The study and description of the interaction between the level of speech and the level of non-verbal communication (primary gestures) is necessary for forensic linguistics in bribery cases. The study of the rules of interaction between verbal and non-verbal is necessary not only for applied linguistics – in particular forensic linguistics, but also for linguistic theory.