Semantic Description Research Articles

Microplastics and Trash Cleaning and Harmonization (MaTCH): Semantic Data Ingestion and Harmonization Using Artificial Intelligence.

With the rapid expansion of microplastic research and reliance on semantic descriptors, there is an increasing need for plastic pollution data harmonization. Data standards have been developed but are seldom implemented across research sectors, geographic regions, environmental media, or size classes of plastic pollution. Harmonization of existing data is currently hindered by increasingly large datasets using thousands of different categorical variable descriptors, as well as various metrics used to describe particle abundance and differing size ranges studied across groups. For this study, we used manually developed relational databases to build an algorithm utilizing artificial intelligence capable of automatically curating harmonized, more usable datasets describing micro to macro plastic pollution in the environment. The study algorithm MaTCH (microplastics and trash cleaning and harmonization) can harmonize datasets with different formats, nomenclature, methods, and measured particle characteristics with an accuracy of 71-94% when matching semantically. All other non-semantic corrections are reported within a 95% confidence interval and with model uncertainty. All steps of the algorithm are integrated in an open-source software tool for the benefit of the scientific community and ease of integration for all plastic pollution data.

Enhancing semantic mapping in text-to-image diffusion via Gather-and-Bind

Text-to-image synthesis is a challenging task that aims to generate realistic and diverse images from natural language descriptions. However, existing text-to-image diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) sometimes fail to satisfy the semantic descriptions of the users, especially when the prompts contain multiple concepts or modifiers such as colors. By visualizing the cross-attention maps of the Stable Diffusion model during the denoising process, we find that one of the concepts has a very scattered attention map, which cannot form a whole and gradually gets ignored. Moreover, the attention maps of the modifiers are hard to overlap with the corresponding concepts, resulting in incorrect semantic mapping. To address this issue, we propose a Gather-and-Bind method that intervenes in the cross-attention maps during the denoising process to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting and attribute binding problems without any pre-training. Specifically, we first use information entropy to measure the dispersion degree of the cross-attention maps and construct an information entropy loss to gather these scattered attention maps, which eventually captures all the concepts in the generated output. Furthermore, we construct an attribute binding loss that minimizes the distance between the attention maps of the attributes and their corresponding concepts, which enables the model to establish correct semantic mapping and significantly improves the performance of the baseline model. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets and demonstrate that our method can better capture the semantic information of the input prompts. Code is available at https://github.com/huan085128/Gather-and-Bind.

Легендарні імена в аспекті відонімного словотвору

The present article continues the author’s previous studies in the theory and research methodology of eponymy. In them, she has proceeded from a parametrical model for the description and analysis of eponymic semantics, whose three principle parameters are related to the underlying proper name, the derived eponym, and the motivational relationship between the first and second. This paper focuses on a special group of proper names from which some eponyms are formed: legendary names. These proper nouns are of a unique onomastic nature, as they occupy an intermediate position between realonyms, i. e. proper names denoting real-world entities, and mythonyms, denoting fictitious, mythical or fantastic entities.

Texture Analysis in Volumetric Imaging for Dentomaxillofacial Radiology: Transforming Diagnostic Approaches and Future Directions

This narrative review explores texture analysis as a valuable technique in dentomaxillofacial diagnosis, providing an advanced method for quantification and characterization of different image modalities. The traditional imaging techniques rely primarily on visual assessment, which may overlook subtle variations in tissue structure. In contrast, texture analysis uses sophisticated algorithms to extract quantitative information from imaging data, thus offering deeper insights into the spatial distribution and relationships of pixel intensities. This process identifies unique “texture signatures”, serving as markers for accurately characterizing tissue changes or pathological processes. The synergy between texture analysis and radiomics allows radiologists to transcend traditional size-based or semantic descriptors, offering a comprehensive understanding of imaging data. This method enhances diagnostic accuracy, particularly for the assessment of oral and maxillofacial pathologies. The integration of texture analysis with radiomics expands the potential for precise tissue characterization by moving beyond the limitations of human eye evaluations. This article reviews the current trends and methodologies in texture analysis within the field of dentomaxillofacial imaging, highlights its practical applications, and discusses future directions for research and dental clinical practice.

Domain embeddings for generating complex descriptions of concepts in Italian language.

In this work, we propose a Distributional Semantic resource enriched with linguistic and lexical information extracted from electronic dictionaries. This resource is designed to bridge the gap between the continuous semantic values represented by distributional vectors and the discrete descriptions provided by general semantics theory. Recently, many researchers have focused on the connection between embeddings and a comprehensive theory of semantics and meaning. This often involves translating the representation of word meanings in Distributional Models into a set of discrete, manually constructed properties, such as semantic primitives or features, using neural decoding techniques. Our approach introduces an alternative strategy based on linguistic data. We have developed a collection of domain-specific co-occurrence matrices derived from two sources: a list of Italian nouns classified into four semantic traits and 20 concrete noun sub-categories and Italian verbs classified by their semantic classes. In these matrices, the co-occurrence values for each word are calculated exclusively with a defined set of words relevant to a particular lexical domain. The resource includes 21 domain-specific matrices, one comprehensive matrix, and a Graphical User Interface. Our model facilitates the generation of reasoned semantic descriptions of concepts by selecting matrices directly associated with concrete conceptual knowledge, such as a matrix based on location nouns and the concept of animal habitats. We assessed the utility of the resource through two experiments, achieving promising outcomes in both the automatic classification of animal nouns and the extraction of animal features.

Research on Semantic Driven Urban Pipeline Dataspace Construction Method

Abstract. Urban pipeline data is heterogeneous in multiple sources and rich in data volume, and there are problems such as data conflict and difficult organization and management due to the heterogeneity of multiple sources when accessing the data in large-scale concurrently. To address this problem, this paper proposes a semantics-driven urban pipeline dataspace construction method, which aims to realize the efficient organization of pipeline data. Firstly, this method combines the classification and characteristics of urban pipelines, and expresses the semantic information of pipeline geographic entities from four dimensions: semantic description, spatial location, attribute characteristics and time evolution. Then, the four expression sets are embedded into the dataspace RDF model as predicates, and the associated description mechanism of pipeline geographic entities is established by means of genus classes and so on, so as to construct the pipeline dataspace RDF model. Finally, the model is stored and graphically visualized using neo4j to achieve fast retrieval of data within the pipeline dataspace. The research results show that this method provides a unified expression of pipeline entities, solves the problem of pipeline multi-source heterogeneous data conflict and organization difficulties, and improves the efficiency of multi-source heterogeneous pipeline data organization while ensuring the integrity of pipeline information to the maximum extent.

Three-dimensional Change Detection and Description in Complex Construction Scenarios

Abstract. In large-scale engineering construction scenarios, construction objects and equipment are numerous; their spatial positions and postures change frequently and are complex and varied. Describing the changes between construction entities and the entities themselves in a three-dimensional (3D) geometric space and functional semantic space is challenging. In response to this challenging, we propose a novel workflow to detect and describe the changes in a construction site. First, we add the constraint of object surface continuity to the octree change detection (OCD), exclude the independently changing cells, and improve the change detection robustness. Second, based on the changes in entity elements that occur in the 3D geometric space, we introduce six-type semantics to characterize the changes that occur. Differing from existing change detection semantic description methods that focus on the attribute semantics of changed entity elements, our method focuses on the semantic description of the change process. Finally, for the variations in different semantic types, we propose specific quantization methods that can better quantify the variations in entity elements in 3D geometric space. For the proposed solution, we tested it using two sets of multi-period time-series point cloud data, which can accurately identify the changing construction entities in space and complete the calculation of bridge construction progress, including the building demolition and construction, and the change in the construction apparatus position.

Spatial-temporal Data Model for Indoor Fire Response Considering Multi-Factors

Abstract. The complexity of high-rise building structures and functions significantly increases the challenges in emergency responses to indoor fire incidents. This complexity is due to multiple factors that must be evaluated for decision-making within the fire scenario, such as the entities within the building, the status of environment, and the actions of people. An effective and precise indoor fire emergency management model should fully take into consideration of multiple factors, aiming to ensure the safety and effectiveness of emergency response action.This paper proposes a spatial-temporal data model to integrate the entity-status-action, for designing the most suitable action strategies in various environmental status by considering all related entities in the indoor fire scenario. Firstly, a list of factors is designed to represent the scenario features including spatial location, semantic description, attribute characteristics, geometric form, evolutionary process, and the relationships among objects. Then, employs an ontology-based descriptive method to integrate multi-dimensions and effectively represents the interrelations among entities, actions, and environmental status within the context of an indoor fire scenario. These environmental status considered in the model focus on the supporting path-planning during execution of direct response actions. Finally, a set of path-planning rules has been developed to infer a series of environmental status supporting to formulate the optimal evacuation strategy to minimize the risk of evacuation failure. The case study shows that the proposed model is effective in unified expression for multitude of factors associated with emergency response in indoor fire scenario and supporting the decision-making of the emergency response actions.

Historical Architecture and BIM Modelling: Between Representation of Reality and Conceptual Abstraction

The essay aims to explore the applications of BIM to design regarding historic buildings, which will become mandatory in Italy from 2025 for public works above €1 million. Despite the advantages in coordinated data management and information sharing among the actors involved in contracts, problems related to the geometric representation and semantic definition of the virtual entities that populate the models have been recognized by the scientific community. Critical issues that have emerged from the study of significant experiences can be traced back to the difficulty of adapting tools designed for the projects of new buildings to the characteristics of the cultural heritage. In particular, the complexity of proposing congruent categorisations and parameterisations seems related to only partial correspondence between historical building components, IFC classes and BIM software categories. These limitations often lead to the identification of contingent solutions and expedients, which solve only the problems of geometric representation. In contrast, the ability to adequately share information stored in databases, interoperable through the IFC format, is conveyed by an appropriate semantic description. Formal representation in the BIM environment effectively refers to standardized industrial production, reproducibility of building elements and, more generally, to the goals of globalisation. Thus, the proposed reflections aim to encourage a conscious use of these tools and to outline implementation perspectives useful to bring the digital environment closer to the concrete reality of historical architecture, unique and irreproducible in origin and transformation, often realized through artisanal processes and anchored to specific contexts in multiple aspects.

Augmenting Multimodal Content Representation with Transformers for Misinformation Detection

Information sharing on social media has become a common practice for people around the world. Since it is difficult to check user-generated content on social media, huge amounts of rumors and misinformation are being spread with authentic information. On the one hand, most of the social platforms identify rumors through manual fact-checking, which is very inefficient. On the other hand, with an emerging form of misinformation that contains inconsistent image–text pairs, it would be beneficial if we could compare the meaning of multimodal content within the same post for detecting image–text inconsistency. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to misinformation detection by multimodal feature fusion with transformers and credibility assessment with self-attention-based Bi-RNN networks. Firstly, captions are derived from images using an image captioning module to obtain their semantic descriptions. These are compared with surrounding text by fine-tuning transformers for consistency check in semantics. Then, to further aggregate sentiment features into text representation, we fine-tune a separate transformer for text sentiment classification, where the output is concatenated to augment text embeddings. Finally, Multi-Cell Bi-GRUs with self-attention are used to train the credibility assessment model for misinformation detection. From the experimental results on tweets, the best performance with an accuracy of 0.904 and an F1-score of 0.921 can be obtained when applying feature fusion of augmented embeddings with sentiment classification results. This shows the potential of the innovative way of applying transformers in our proposed approach to misinformation detection. Further investigation is needed to validate the performance on various types of multimodal discrepancies.

A behaviouristic semantic approach to blockchain-based e-commerce

Electronic commerce and finance are progressively supporting and including decentralized, shared and public ledgers such as the blockchain. This is reshaping traditional commercial activities by advancing them towards Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Commerce 3.0, thereby supporting the latter’s potential to outpace the hurdles of central authority controllers and lawgivers. The quantity and entropy of the information that must be sought and managed to become active participants in such a relentlessly evolving scenario are increasing at a steady pace. For example, that information comprises asset or service description, general rules of the game, and specific technologies involved for decentralization. Moreover, the relevant information ought to be shared among innumerable and heterogeneous stakeholders, such as producers, buyers, digital identity providers, valuation services, and shipment services, to just name a few. A clear semantic representation of such a complex and multifaceted blockchain-based e-Commerce ecosystem would contribute dramatically to make it more usable, namely more automatically accessible to virtually anyone wanting to play the role of a stakeholder, thereby reducing programmers’ effort. However, we feel that reaching that goal still requires substantial effort in the tailoring of Semantic Web technologies, hence this article sets out on such a route and advances a stack of OWL 2 ontologies for the semantic description of decentralized e-commerce. The stack includes a number of relevant features, ranging from the applicable stakeholders through the supply chain of the offerings for an asset, up to the Ethereum blockchain, its tokens and smart contracts. Ontologies are defined by taking a behaviouristic approach to represent the various participants as agents in terms of their actions, inspired by the Theory of Agents and the related mentalistic notions. The stack is validated through appropriate metrics and SPARQL queries implementing suitable competency questions, then demonstrated through the representation of a real world use case, namely, the iExec marketplace.

Label-Guided relation prototype generation for Continual Relation Extraction

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to extract relations towards the continuous and iterative arrival of new data. To address the problem of catastrophic forgetting, some existing research endeavors have focused on exploring memory replay methods by storing typical historical learned instances or embedding all observed relations as prototypes by averaging the hidden representation of samples and replaying them in the subsequent training process. However, this prototype generation method overlooks the rich semantic information within the label namespace and are also constrained by memory size, resulting in inadequate descriptions of relation semantics by relation prototypes. To this end, we introduce an approach termed Label-Guided Relation Prototype Generation. Initially, we enhance the representations of label embeddings through a technique named label knowledge infusion. Following that, we utilize the multi-head attention mechanism to form relation prototypes, allowing them to capture diverse aspects of typical instances. The embeddings of relation labels are utilized at this stage, leveraging their contained semantics. Additionally, we propose a feature-based distillation loss function called multi-similarity distillation, to ensure the model retains prior knowledge after learning new tasks. The experimental results indicate that our method has achieved competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art baseline models in CRE.

A higher-order transformation approach to the formalization and analysis of BPMN using graph transformation systems

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a widely used standard notation for defining intra- and inter-organizational workflows. However, the informal description of the BPMN execution semantics leads to different interpretations of BPMN elements and difficulties in checking behavioral properties. In this article, we propose a formalization of the execution semantics of BPMN that, compared to existing approaches, covers more BPMN elements while also facilitating property checking. Our approach is based on a higher-order transformation from BPMN models to graph transformation systems. To show the capabilities of our approach, we implemented it as an open-source web-based tool.

Multi‐Dimensional Knowledge System and Ontology Construction of Qi Culture from the Meme Perspective

ABSTRACTThis paper deconstructs the profound context of Qi Culture from the perspective of Meme and constructs a structured and systematic knowledge description framework. It is useful for exploring the core values and promoting the creative transformation and innovative development of Qi Culture. The research process involves collecting user discussions and research data about Qi Culture from multiple sources, and then using the BERTopic model and qualitative analysis methods to obtain diverse examples of Qi cultural elements. Afterwards, from the Meme perspective, Qi cultural memes are extracted to construct a domain ontology, thereby achieving multi‐dimensional semantic knowledge description of Qi Culture. This study helps to reveal the core elements of culture and their relationships, and will provide strong theoretical support for the integration and utilization of cultural resources.

Zero shot plant disease classification with semantic attributes

In the rapidly evolving field of plant disease detection, the number and complexity of crop diseases are increasing, made worse by factors like climate change. Addressing these challenges requires robust and efficient methodologies capable of early and accurate disease identification. This paper explores the integration of advanced deep learning techniques, including pre-trained models, zero-shot learning, and semantic attributes to enhance the effectiveness of plant disease detection systems. High level features extracted from the images by these pretrained models capture crucial patterns, while domain-specific semantic attributes, such as leaf texture and color variations, enhance the understanding. Incorporating zero-shot learning enables adaptation to new and unseen diseases using semantic descriptions. Experimental validation across diverse plant species and disease types underscores the approach’s reliability in real-world agricultural scenarios. Our approach has demonstrated superior performance with plant village dataset, showing a significant improvement in accuracy and generalization. These results underscore the potential of our method to revolutionize plant disease detection and management in agricultural practices.

Revolutionizing Urban Mobility: Smart Transportation & Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communication – A Review

The burgeoning popularity of IoT technology has significantly altered transportation, with an extensive variety of repercussions. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are at the vanguard of this change, which has the potential to fundamentally change urban transportation for both individuals and businesses. ITS has expanded considerably in recent years, owing to global urbanization and industrialization advancements. It is regarded as a game-changing technology that improves road safety, improves traffic flow, and improves the entire driving experience. Despite many research efforts on ITS applications and simulation platforms, formal semantic descriptions for intelligent transportation systems have been noticeably lacking. Rising rates of accidents suggest the necessity for a robust Smart Transport System (STS) that prioritizes improving mobility, and reliability, as well as reducing carbon dioxide and methane emissions from automobiles beyond dispersing gains throughout everywhere. Multiple traffic signal management approaches have been designed to enhance real-time traffic movement at intersections, but none have achieved seamless, congestion-free traffic movements. The creation of an interconnected unified framework that integrates and links vehicles with VANET, IoT, and AI technologies will significantly affect the establishment of an innovative reliable mobility network. Internet of Vehicles (IoV) systems will connect several automobiles to share vital information through an IoT-enabled network. Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication is essential in developing intelligent transportation and rail traffic management systems, significantly improving road traffic safety and efficiency. A V2I system integrates transmission and analysis capabilities into vehicles and corresponding infrastructure. Wireless sensors are strategically positioned along highways or driving zones in this system. The significance of safe and effective V2X communication between automobiles and facilities expands substantially as intelligent modes of transport progress.

The impact of semantic descriptions on learning object-to-object relationships in a scene

The impact of semantic descriptions on learning object-to-object relationships in a scene

Bridging auditory perception and natural language processing with semantically informed deep neural networks

Sound recognition is effortless for humans but poses a significant challenge for artificial hearing systems. Deep neural networks (DNNs), especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have recently surpassed traditional machine learning in sound classification. However, current DNNs map sounds to labels using binary categorical variables, neglecting the semantic relations between labels. Cognitive neuroscience research suggests that human listeners exploit such semantic information besides acoustic cues. Hence, our hypothesis is that incorporating semantic information improves DNN’s sound recognition performance, emulating human behaviour. In our approach, sound recognition is framed as a regression problem, with CNNs trained to map spectrograms to continuous semantic representations from NLP models (Word2Vec, BERT, and CLAP text encoder). Two DNN types were trained: semDNN with continuous embeddings and catDNN with categorical labels, both with a dataset extracted from a collection of 388,211 sounds enriched with semantic descriptions. Evaluations across four external datasets, confirmed the superiority of semantic labeling from semDNN compared to catDNN, preserving higher-level relations. Importantly, an analysis of human similarity ratings for natural sounds, showed that semDNN approximated human listener behaviour better than catDNN, other DNNs, and NLP models. Our work contributes to understanding the role of semantics in sound recognition, bridging the gap between artificial systems and human auditory perception.

Superclass-aware visual feature disentangling for generalized zero-shot learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to learn a model trained on seen samples with the ability to recognize samples from unseen classes, while generalized ZSL (GZSL) takes a step closer to realistic scenarios by recognizing both of seen and unseen samples. The existing methods rely on the semantic descriptions as the side-information and conduct tight alignment between the visual and semantic spaces. However, the tight modality alignment may result in incomplete representations, leading to the loss of originally detailed and discriminative information. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective superclass-aware visual feature disentangling method termed as SupVFD for GZSL. We use the neighbor relations of the semantic descriptions to define superclass and with the guide of superclass, our method disentangles visual features into discriminative and transferable factors. To this end, the semantic descriptions are used as implicit supervision, which preserves the valuable detailed and discriminative information in the visual features. The extensive experiments in both ZSL and GZSL settings prove our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for image object classification as well as video action recognition. Code is available at our github: https://github.com/changniu54/SupVFD-Master.

MAIANet: Signal modulation in cassava leaf disease classification

Cassava is the third largest source of carbohydrates for human consumption worldwide; however, it is highly susceptible to viral and bacterial diseases, which pose a significant threat to food security. The advancement of deep learning algorithms in precision agriculture holds the key to enabling the early classification of plant diseases, thereby leading to enhanced crop yields and ultimately stabilizing food security. In the coarse-grained label discrimination task of weak supervision learning, high-quality semantic features contain abundant semantic description information, which plays a crucial role in constructing a precise description of plant disease discrimination in tanglesome field circumstances and directly influences the performance of neural networks. Thus, a multiattention IBN anti-aliasing neural network (MAIANet) was proposed to improve the classification accuracy of cassava leaf disease classification by improving the feature quality in the coarseness label classification task. The proposed MAIANet neural network includes two innovative approaches. First, the multiattention method was designed to scale the feature signals twice to adjust the angular frequency of the feature signals in the residual branch for optimal feature fitting within the residual unit. Second, the anti-aliasing block extracts the high-frequency component feature and optimizes the quantization result of the pooling operation to depress the aliasing signal in the down-sampled feature maps. When the proposed method was tested and validated on the cassava dataset, the results showed that the prediction accuracy of the proposed method significantly improved, with an accuracy of 95.83 %, a loss of 1.720, and an F1-score of 0.9585, outperforming V2-ResNet-101, EfficientNet-B5, RepVGG-B3g4, and AlexNet with significant margins. Based on the above experimental results, the proposed algorithm is suitable for classifying cassava leaf diseases.