Sara Evensen, Aaron Feng, Alon Halevy, Jinfeng Li, Vivian Li, Yuliang Li, Huining Liu, George Mihaila, John Morales, Natalie Nuno, Ekaterina Pavlovic, Wang-Chiew Tan, Xiaolan Wang
We describe Voyageur, which is an application of experiential search to the domain of travel. Unlike traditional search engines for online services, experiential search focuses on the experiential aspects of the service under consideration. In particular, Voyageur needs to handle queries for subjective aspects of the service (e.g., quiet hotel, friendly staff) and combine these with objective attributes, such as price and location. Voyageur also highlights interesting facts and tips about the services the user is considering to provide them with further insights into their choices.
A common need of NLP applications is to extract structured data from text corpora in order to perform analytics or trigger an appropriate action. The ontology defining the structure is typically application dependent and in many cases it is not known a priori. We describe the FrameIt System that provides a workflow for (1) quickly discovering an ontology to model a text corpus and (2) learning an SRL model that extracts the instances of the ontology from sentences in the corpus. FrameIt exploits data that is obtained in the ontology discovery phase as weak supervision data to bootstrap the SRL model and then enables the user to refine the model with active learning. We present empirical results and qualitative analysis of the performance of FrameIt on three corpora of noisy user-generated text.
Xiaolan Wang, Aaron Feng, Behzad Golshan, Alon Y. Halevy, George A. Mihaila, Hidekazu Oiwa, Wang-Chiew Tan
We present the KOKO system that takes declarative information extraction to a new level by incorporating advances in natural language processing techniques in its extraction language. KOKO is
novel in that its extraction language simultaneously supports conditions on the surface of the text and on the structure of the dependency parse tree of sentences, thereby allowing for more refined
extractions. KOKO also supports conditions that are forgiving to
linguistic variation of expressing concepts and allows to aggregate
evidence from the entire document in order to filter extractions.
To scale up, KOKO exploits a multi-indexing scheme and heuristics for efficient extractions. We extensively evaluate KOKO over
publicly available text corpora. We show that KOKO indices take up
the smallest amount of space, are notably faster and more effective
than a number of prior indexing schemes. Finally, we demonstrate
KOKO’s scalability on a corpus of 5 million Wikipedia articles.
Xiaolan Wang, Jiyu Komiya, Yoshihiko Suhara, Aaron Feng, Behzad Golshan, Alon Y. Halevy, Wang-Chiew Tan
KOKO is a declarative information extraction system that incorporates advances in natural language processing techniques in its extraction language. KOKO’s extraction language supports simultaneous specification of conditions over the surface syntax and on the
structure of the dependency parse tree of sentences, thereby allowing for more refined extractions. Furthermore, the KOKO extraction
language allows for aggregating evidence from an input document
and supports conditions that are tolerant of linguistic variation of
expressing concepts.
In this demo, we outline the design of KOKO, a system for extracting information and understanding the results of the extraction.
KOKO provides an interactive interface that allows participants to
write queries, understand the input and results of the queries. In
particular, the user can customize the input text, visualize the input
text’s dependency parse trees, and understand the correspondences
between query components, dependency tree nodes, text tokens,
and the computation and associated scores that led to an extraction.
Chen Chen, Behzad Golshan, Alon Y. Halevy, Wang-Chiew Tan, AnHai Doan
We present BIGGORILLA, an open-source resource for data scientists who need data preparation and
integration tools, and the vision underlying the project. We then describe four packages that we contributed to BIGGORILLA: KOKO (an information extraction tool), FLEXMATCHER (a schema matching
tool), MAGELLAN and DEEPMATCHER (two entity matching tools). We hope that as more software
packages are added to BIGGORILLA, it will become a one-stop resource for both researchers and industry practitioners, and will enable our community to advance the state of the art at a faster pace.
Akari Asai, Sara Evensen, Behzad Golshan, Alon Y. Halevy, Vivian Li, Andrei Lopatenko, Daniela Stepanov, Yoshihiko Suhara, Wang-Chiew Tan, Yinzhan Xu
The science of happiness is an area of positive psychology concerned with understanding what behaviors make people happy in a
sustainable fashion. Recently, there has been interest in developing technologies that help incorporate the findings of the science of
happiness into users’ daily lives by steering them towards behaviors that increase happiness. With the goal of building technology that
can understand how people express their happy moments in text, we crowd-sourced HappyDB, a corpus of 100,000 happy moments
that we make publicly available. This paper describes HappyDB and its properties, and outlines several important NLP problems that
can be studied with the help of the corpus. We also apply several state-of-the-art analysis techniques to analyze HappyDB. Our results
demonstrate the need for deeper NLP techniques to be developed which makes HappyDB an exciting resource for follow-on research.
Keywords:science of happiness, positive psychology, happyDB corpus, crowdsourcing