Dynamic Machine Learning Using the KBpedia Knowledge Graph – Part 1

Frederick Giasson

In my previous blog post, Create a Domain Text Classifier Using Cognonto, I explained how one can use the KBpedia Knowledge Graph to automatically create positive and negative training corpuses for different machine learning tasks. I explained how SVM classifiers could be trained and used to check if an input text belongs to the defined domain or not.

This article is the first of two articles.In first part I will extend on this idea to explain how the KBpedia Knowledge Graph can be used, along with other machine learning techniques, to cope with different situations and use cases. I will cover the concepts of feature selection, hyperparameter optimization, and ensemble learning (in part 2 of this series). The emphasis here is on the testing and refining of machine learners, versus the set up and configuration times that dominate other approaches.

Depending on the domain of interest, and depending on the required precision or recall, different strategies and techniques can lead to better predictions. More often than not, multiple different training corpuses, learners and hyperparameters need to be tested before ending up with the initial best possible prediction model. This is why I will strongly emphasize the fact that the KBpedia Knowledge Graph and Cognonto can be used to automate fully the creation of a wide range of different training corpuses, to create models, to optimize their hyperparameters, and to evaluate those models.

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Building and Maintaining the KBpedia Knowledge Graph

Frederick Giasson

The Cognonto demo is powered by an extensive knowledge graph called the KBpedia Knowledge Graph, as organized according to the KBpedia Knowledge Ontology (KKO). KBpedia is used for all kinds of tasks, some of which are demonstrated by the Cognonto use cases. KBpedia powers dataset linkage and mapping tools, machine learning training workflows, entity and concept extractions, category and topic tagging, etc.

The KBpedia Knowledge Graph is a structure of more than 39,000 reference concepts linked to 6 major knowledge bases and 20 popular ontologies in use across the Web. Unlike other knowledge graphs that analyze big corpuses of text to extract “concepts” (n-grams) and their co-occurrences, KBpedia has been created, is curated, is linked, and evolves using humans for the final vetting steps. KBpedia and its build process is thus a semi-automatic system.

The challenge with such a project is to be able to grow and refine (add or remove relations) within the structure without creating unknown conceptual issues. The sheer combinatorial scope of KBpedia means it is not possible for a human to fully understand the impact of adding or removing a relation on its entire structure. There is simply too much complexity in the interaction amongst the reference concepts (and their different kinds of relations) within the KBpedia Knowledge Graph.

What I discuss in this article is how Cognonto creates and then constantly evolves the KBpedia Knowledge Graph. In parallel with our creating KBpedia over the years, we also have needed to develop our own build processes and tools to make sure that every time something changes in KBpedia’s structure that it remains satisfiable and coherent.

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Create a Domain Text Classifier Using Cognonto

Frederick Giasson

A common task required by systems that automatically analyze text is to classify an input text into one or multiple classes. A model needs to be created to scope the class (what belongs to it and what does not) and then a classification algorithm uses this model to classify an input text.

Multiple classification algorithms exists to perform such a task: Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neigbours (KNN), C4.5 and others. What is hard with any such text classification task is not so much how to use these algorithms: they are generally easy to configure and use once implemented in a programming language. The hard – and time-consuming – part is to create a sound training corpus that will properly define the class you want to predict. Further, the steps required to create such a training corpus must be duplicated for each class you want to predict.

Since creating the training corpus is what is time consuming, this is where Cognonto provides its advantages.

In this article, we will show you how Cognonto’s KBpedia Knowledge Graph can be used to automatically generate training corpuses that are used to generate classification models. First, we define (scope) a domain with one or multiple KBpedia reference concepts. Second, we aggregate the training corpus for that domain using the KBpedia Knowledge Graph and its linkages to external public datasets that are then used to populate the training corpus of the domain. Third, we use the Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) algorithm to create a vectorial representation of the training corpus. Fourth, we create a model using (in this use case) an SVM classifier. Finally, we predict if an input text belongs to the class (scoped domain) or not.

This use case can be used in any workflow that needs to pre-process any set of input texts where the objective is to classify relevant ones into a defined domain.

Unlike more traditional topic taggers where topics are tagged in an input text with weights provided for each of them, we will see how it is possible to use the semantic interpreter to tag main concepts related to an input text even if the surface form of the topic is not mentioned in the text. We accomplish this by leveraging ESA’s semantic interpreter.

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