Machine comprehension of text is the overarching goal of a great deal of research in natural language processing. The Machine Comprehension Test (Richardson et al., 2013) was recently proposed to assess methods on an open-domain, extensible, and easy-to-evaluate task consisting of two datasets. In this paper we develop a lexical matching method that takes into account multiple context windows, question types and coreference resolution. We show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline of Richardson et al. (2013), and despite its relative simplicity, is comparable to recent work using machine learning. We hope that our approach will inform future work on this task. Furthermore, we argue that MC500 is harder than MC160 due to the way question answer pairs were created.

A full-fledged data exploration system must combine different access modalities with a powerful concept of guiding the user in the exploration process, by being reactive and anticipative both for data discovery and for data linking. Such systems are a real opportunity for our community to cater to users with different domain and data science expertise. We introduce INODE - an end-to-end data exploration system - that leverages, on the one hand, Machine Learning and, on the other hand, semantics for the purpose of Data Management (DM). Our vision is to develop a classic unified, comprehensive platform that provides extensive access to open datasets, and we demonstrate it in three significant use cases in the fields of Cancer Biomarker Research, Research and Innovation Policy Making, and Astrophysics. INODE offers sustainable services in (a) data modeling and linking, (b) integrated query processing using natural language, (c) guidance, and (d) data exploration through visualization, thus facilitating the user in discovering new insights. We demonstrate that our system is uniquely accessible to a wide range of users from larger scientific communities to the public. Finally, we briefly illustrate how this work paves the way for new research opportunities in DM.

Querying both structured and unstructured data via a single common query interface such as SQL or natural language has been a long standing research goal. Moreover, as methods for extracting information from unstructured data become ever more powerful, the desire to integrate the output of such extraction processes with ''clean'', structured data grows. We are convinced that for successful integration into databases, such extracted information in the form of ''triples'' needs to be both (1) of high quality and ( 2) have the necessary generality to link up with varying forms of structured data. It is the combination of both these aspects, which heretofore have been usually treated in isolation, where our approach breaks new ground.The cornerstone of our work is a novel, generic method for extracting open information triples from unstructured text, using a combination of linguistics and learning-based extraction methods, thus uniquely balancing both precision and recall. Our system called LILLIE (LInked Linguistics and Learning-Based Information Extractor) uses dependency tree modification rules to refine triples from a high-recall learning-based engine, and combines them with syntactic triples from a high-precision engine to increase effectiveness. In addition, our system features several augmentations, which modify the generality and the degree of granularity of the output triples. Even though our focus is on addressing both quality and generality simultaneously, our new method substantially outperforms current state-of-the-art systems on the two widely-used CaRB and Re-OIE16 benchmark sets for information extraction.We have made our code publicly available 1 to facilitate further research.

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In the context of extracting relevant skill-terms from job advertisements, we propose a syntax-based method for generating large amounts of machine-labelled text from a small amount of human-labelled data. This is then used to solve the vocabulary problem and significantly increase recall when detecting skills.