Fabian M. Suchanek (Télécom Paris) ran a Seminar@SystemX on the topic: A hitchhiker’s guide to Ontology, on January 25, 2024, from 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm.
Abstract:
Language Models have brought major breakthroughs in natural language processing. Notwithstanding this success, I will show that certain applications still need symbolic representations. I will then show how different methods (language models and others) can be harnessed to build such symbolic representations. I will also introduce our main project in this direction, the YAGO knowledge base. I will then talk about the incompleteness of knowledge bases. We have developed several techniques to estimate how much data is missing in a knowledge base, as well as rule mining methods to derive that data. I will then present our work on efficient querying of knowledge bases. Finally, I will talk about applications of knowledge bases in the domain of speech analysis and the digital humanities, as well as about our methods for explainable AI.
Biography:
Fabian M. Suchanek is a full professor at the Telecom Paris University in France. He obtained his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics under the supervision of Gerhard Weikum. In his thesis, Fabian developed inter alia the knowledge base YAGO, one of the largest public general-purpose knowledge bases, which earned him a honorable mention of the SIGMOD dissertation award. Fabian was a postdoc at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley (reporting to Rakesh Agrawal) and at INRIA Saclay/France (reporting to Serge Abiteboul). He continued as the leader of the Otto Hahn Research Group “Ontologies” at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany. Since 2013, he is an associate professor at Télécom Paris University in France, and since 2016 a full professor. Fabian teaches classes on the Semantic Web, Information Extraction and Knowledge Representation in France, in Germany, and in Senegal. With his students, he works on information extraction, rule mining, ontology matching, and other topics related to large knowledge bases. He has published more than 100 scientific articles, among others at ISWC, VLDB, SIGMOD, WWW, CIKM, ICDE, and SIGIR, and his work has been cited more than 16,000 times. His 2007 paper on YAGO won the Test of Time Award of the WWW 2018 conference.
