The Reading Group is a seminar for DERI researchers and other people interested in learning about seminal works in areas relevant to our research. In this weekly held event, scientific papers or textbooks chosen by the speaker are being presented and discussed. The Reading group is meant as a forum where we particularly focus on research done outside of DERI. Topics of the presented articles can vary greatly, and serve the purpose to deepen knowledge on relevant research going on in the fields DERI is involved in. Also, the seminar gives the presenters the chance to present excellent research results in a confined environment to practice their presentation skills and get feedback from a broader audience. Each of the presentations is followed by a discussion about impact and relevance of the presented work on our own research. Reading groups are normally held on Wednesday afternoon at 14:00 in the DERI Conference Room, unless otherwise specified.
On this page upcoming reading groups are listed exclusively. Please see the archive for more on given reading groups.
Development of a Controlled Natural Language Interface for Semantic MediaWikibased on Development of a Controlled Natural Language Interface for Semantic MediaWiki by Smart, P., Bao, J., Braines, D., Shadbolt, N. Brian DavisAbstractSemantic wikis support the collaborative creation, editing and utilization of semantically-enriched content, and they may therefore be well-suited to addressing problems associated with the limited availability of high-quality online semantic content. Unfortunately, however, many popular semantic wikis, such as Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), are not sufficiently expressive to support full-scale ontology authoring. Furthermore, the grounding of the Semantic Web in formal logic makes both the comprehension and production of ontological content difficult for many end-users. In order to address these issues, the expressivity of SMW was extended using a combination of semantic templates and a Web Ontology Language (OWL) meta-model. Semantic templates were also used to provide an ontology verbalization capability for SMW using the Rabbit Controlled Natural Language (CNL). The resulting system demonstrates how CNL interfaces can be implemented on top of SMW. The proposed solution introduces no changes to the underlying functionality of the SMW system, and the use of semantic templates as an ontology verbalization solution means that end-users can exploit all the usual features of conventional wiki systems to collaboratively create new CNL verbalization capabilities. |
Date: 24th of March 2010 Original Paper: |
Challenges in Building Large-Scale Information Retrieval Systemsbased on Challenges in Building Large-Scale Information Retrieval Systems by Jeffrey Dean Renaud DelbruAbstractBuilding and operating large-scale information retrieval systems used by hundreds of millions of people around the world provides a number of interesting challenges. Designing such systems requires making complex design tradeoffs in a number of dimensions, including (a) the number of user queries that must be handled per second and the response latency to these requests, (b) the number and size of various corpora that are searched, (c) the latency and frequency with which documents are updated or added to the corpora, and (d) the quality and cost of the ranking algorithms that are used for retrieval.In this talk I'll discuss the evolution of Google's hardware infrastructure and information retrieval systems and some of the design challenges that arise from ever-increasing demands in all of these dimensions. I'll also describe how we use various pieces of distributed systems infrastructure when building these retrieval systems. Finally, I'll describe some future challenges and open research problems in this area. |
Date: 30th of June 2010 Material (Slides): |





