Looks at how Natural language Processing underpins the Semantic Web, including its initial construction from unstructured sources like the World Wide Web.

This book introduces core natural language processing (NLP) technologies to non-experts in an easily accessible way, as a series of building blocks that lead the user to understand key technologies, why they are required, and how to integrate them into Semantic Web applications. Natural language processing and Semantic Web technologies have different, but complementary roles in data management. Combining these two technologies enables structured and unstructured data to merge seamlessly. Semantic Web technologies aim to convert unstructured data to meaningful representations, which benefit enormously from the use of NLP technologies, thereby enabling applications such as connecting text to Linked Open Data, connecting texts to each other, semantic searching, information visualization, and modeling of user behavior in online networks. The first half of this book describes the basic NLP processing tools: tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and morphological analysis, in addition to the main tools required for an information extraction system (named entity recognition and relation extraction) which build on these components. The second half of the book explains how Semantic Web and NLP technologies can enhance each other, for example via semantic annotation, ontology linking, and population. These chapters also discuss sentiment analysis, a key component in making sense of textual data, and the difficulties of performing NLP on social media, as well as some proposed solutions. The book finishes by investigating some applications of these tools, focusing on semantic search and visualization, modeling user behavior, and an outlook on the future.

This book serves as a starting point for Semantic Web (SW) students and researchers interested in discovering what Natural Language Processing (NLP) has to offer. NLP can effectively help uncover the large portions of data held as unstructured text in natural language, thus augmenting the real content of the Semantic Web in a significant and lasting way. The book covers the basics of NLP, with a focus on Natural Language Understanding (NLU), referring to semantic processing, information extraction and knowledge acquisition, which are seen as the key links between the SW and NLP communities. Major emphasis is placed on mining sentences in search of entities and relations. In the course of this “quest", challenges will be encountered for various text analysis tasks, including part-of-speech tagging, parsing, semantic disambiguation, named entity recognition and relation extraction. Standard algorithms associated with these tasks are presented to provide an understanding of the fundamental concepts. Furthermore, the importance of experimental design and result analysis is emphasized, and accordingly, most chapters include small experiments on corpus data with quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results. This book is divided into four parts. Part I “Searching for Entities in Text” is dedicated to the search for entities in textual data. Next, Part II “Working with Corpora” investigates corpora as valuable resources for NLP work. In turn, Part III “Semantic Grounding and Relatedness” focuses on the process of linking surface forms found in text to entities in resources. Finally, Part IV “Knowledge Acquisition” delves into the world of relations and relation extraction. The book also includes three appendices: “A Look into the Semantic Web” gives a brief overview of the Semantic Web and is intended to bring readers less familiar with the Semantic Web up to speed, so that they too can fully benefit from the material of this book. “NLP Tools and Platforms” provides information about NLP platforms and tools, while “Relation Lists” gathers lists of relations under different categories, showing how relations can be varied and serve different purposes. And finally, the book includes a glossary of over 200 terms commonly used in NLP. The book offers a valuable resource for graduate students specializing in SW technologies and professionals looking for new tools to improve the applicability of SW techniques in everyday life – or, in short, everyone looking to learn about NLP in order to expand his or her horizons. It provides a wealth of information for readers new to both fields, helping them understand the underlying principles and the challenges they may encounter.

This open access book provides an overview of the recent advances in representation learning theory, algorithms and applications for natural language processing (NLP). It is divided into three parts. Part I presents the representation learning techniques for multiple language entries, including words, phrases, sentences and documents. Part II then introduces the representation techniques for those objects that are closely related to NLP, including entity-based world knowledge, sememe-based linguistic knowledge, networks, and cross-modal entries. Lastly, Part III provides open resource tools for representation learning techniques, and discusses the remaining challenges and future research directions. The theories and algorithms of representation learning presented can also benefit other related domains such as machine learning, social network analysis, semantic Web, information retrieval, data mining and computational biology. This book is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, researchers, lecturers, and industrial engineers, as well as anyone interested in representation learning and natural language processing.

This book introduces core natural language processing (NLP) technologies to non-experts in an easily accessible way, as a series of building blocks that lead the user to understand key technologies, why they are required, and how to integrate them into Semantic Web applications. Natural language processing and Semantic Web technologies have different, but complementary roles in data management. Combining these two technologies enables structured and unstructured data to merge seamlessly. Semantic Web technologies aim to convert unstructured data to meaningful representations, which benefit enormously from the use of NLP technologies, thereby enabling applications such as connecting text to Linked Open Data, connecting texts to each other, semantic searching, information visualization, and modeling of user behavior in online networks. The first half of this book describes the basic NLP processing tools: tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and morphological analysis, in addition to the main tools required for an information extraction system (named entity recognition and relation extraction) which build on these components. The second half of the book explains how Semantic Web and NLP technologies can enhance each other, for example via semantic annotation, ontology linking, and population. These chapters also discuss sentiment analysis, a key component in making sense of textual data, and the difficulties of performing NLP on social media, as well as some proposed solutions. The book finishes by investigating some applications of these tools, focusing on semantic search and visualization, modeling user behavior, and an outlook on the future.

For humans, understanding a natural language sentence or discourse is so effortless that we hardly ever think about it. For machines, however, the task of interpreting natural language, especially grasping meaning beyond the literal content, has proven extremely difficult and requires a large amount of background knowledge. This book focuses on the interpretation of natural language with respect to specific domain knowledge captured in ontologies. The main contribution is an approach that puts ontologies at the center of the interpretation process. This means that ontologies not only provide a formalization of domain knowledge necessary for interpretation but also support and guide the construction of meaning representations. We start with an introduction to ontologies and demonstrate how linguistic information can be attached to them by means of the ontology lexicon model lemon. These lexica then serve as basis for the automatic generation of grammars, which we use to compositionally construct meaning representations that conform with the vocabulary of an underlying ontology. As a result, the level of representational granularity is not driven by language but by the semantic distinctions made in the underlying ontology and thus by distinctions that are relevant in the context of a particular domain. We highlight some of the challenges involved in the construction of ontology-based meaning representations, and show how ontologies can be exploited for ambiguity resolution and the interpretation of temporal expressions. Finally, we present a question answering system that combines all tools and techniques introduced throughout the book in a real-world application, and sketch how the presented approach can scale to larger, multi-domain scenarios in the context of the Semantic Web. Table of Contents: List of Figures / Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Ontologies / Linguistic Formalisms / Ontology Lexica / Grammar Generation / Putting Everything Together / Ontological Reasoning for Ambiguity Resolution / Temporal Interpretation / Ontology-Based Interpretation for Question Answering / Conclusion / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies

Managing vagueness/fuzziness is starting to play an important role in Semantic Web research, with a large number of research efforts underway. Foundations of Fuzzy Logic and Semantic Web Languages provides a rigorous and succinct account of the mathematical methods and tools used for representing and reasoning with fuzzy information within Semantic