Papers

Knowledge of objects and their parts, meronym relations, are at the heart of many question-answering systems, but manually encoding these facts is impractical. Past researchers have tried hand-written patterns, supervised learning, and bootstrapped methods, but achieving both high precision and recall has proven elusive. This paper reports on a thorough exploration of distant supervision to learn a meronym extractor for the domain of college biology. We introduce a novel algorithm, generalizing the "at least one" assumption of multi-instance learning to handle the case where a fixed (but unknown) percentage of bag members are positive examples. Detailed experiments compare strategies for mention detection, negative example generation, leveraging out-of-domain meronyms, and evaluate the benefit of our multi-instance percentage model.

Biological processes are complex phenomena involving a series of events that are related to one another through various relationships. Systems that can understand and reason over biological processes would dramatically improve the performance of semantic applications involving inference such as question answering (QA) — specifically "How?" and "Why?" questions. In this paper, we present the task of process extraction, in which events within a process and the relations between the events are automatically extracted from text. We represent processes by graphs whose edges describe a set of temporal, causal and co-reference event-event relations, and characterize the structural properties of these graphs (e.g., the graphs are connected). Then, we present a method for extracting relations between the events, which exploits these structural properties by performing joint inference over the set of extracted relations. On a novel dataset containing 148 descriptions of biological processes (released with this paper), we show significant improvement comparing to baselines that disregard process structure.

Our long-term interest is in machines that contain large amounts of general and scientific knowledge, stored in a "computable" form that supports reasoning and explanation. As a medium-term focus for this, our goal is to have the computer pass a fourth-grade science test, anticipating that much of the required knowledge will need to be acquired semi-automatically. This paper presents the first step towards this goal, namely a blueprint of the knowledge requirements for an early science exam, and a brief description of the resources, methods, and challenges involved in the semiautomatic acquisition of that knowledge. The result of our analysis suggests that as well as fact extraction from text and statistically driven rule extraction, three other styles of automatic knowledge-base construction (AKBC) would be useful: acquiring definitional knowledge, direct "reading" of rules from texts that state them, and, given a particular representational framework (e.g., qualitative reasoning), acquisition of specific instances of those models from text (e..g, specific qualitative models).

As part of our work on building a "knowledgeable textbook" about biology, we are developing a textual question-answering (QA) system that can answer certain classes of biology questions posed by users. In support of that, we are building a "textual KB" - an assembled set of semi-structured assertions based on the book - that can be used to answer users' queries, can be improved using global consistency constraints, and can be potentially validated and corrected by domain experts. Our approach is to view the KB as systematically caching answers from a QA system, and the QA system as assembling answers from the KB, the whole process kickstarted with an initial set of textual extractions from the book text itself. Although this research is only in a preliminary stage, we summarize our progress and lessons learned to date.