Adequate representation of natural language semantics requires access to vast amounts of common sense and domain-specific world knowledge. Prior work in the field was based on purely statistical techniques that did not make use of background knowledge, on limited lexicographic knowledge bases such as WordNet, or on huge manual efforts such as the CYC project. Here we propose a novel method, called Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), for fine-grained semantic interpretation of unrestricted natural language texts. Our method represents meaning in a high-dimensional space of concepts derived from Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in existence. We explicitly represent the meaning of any text in terms of Wikipedia-based concepts. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on text categorization and on computing the degree of semantic relatedness between fragments of natural language text. Using ESA results in significant improvements over the previous state of the art in both tasks. Importantly, due to the use of natural concepts, the ESA model is easy to explain to human users

Information retrieval systems traditionally rely on textual keywords to index and retrieve documents. Keyword-based retrieval may return inaccurate and incomplete results when different keywords are used to describe the same concept in the documents and in the queries. Furthermore, the relationship between these related keywords may be semantic rather than syntactic, and capturing it thus requires access to comprehensive human world knowledge. Concept-based retrieval methods have attempted to tackle these difficulties by using manually built thesauri, by relying on term cooccurrence data, or by extracting latent word relationships and concepts from a corpus. In this article we introduce a new concept-based retrieval approach based on Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), a recently proposed method that augments keywordbased text representation with concept-based features, automatically extracted from massive human knowledge repositories such as Wikipedia. Our approach generates new text features automatically, and we have found that high-quality feature selection becomes crucial in this setting to make the retrieval more focused. However, due to the lack of labeled data, traditional feature selection methods cannot be used, hence we propose new methods that use self-generated labeled training data. The resulting system is evaluated on several TREC datasets, showing superior performance over previous state-of-the-art results.

The problem we tackle in this work is, given a present news event, to generate a plausible future event that can be caused by the given event. We present a new methodology for modeling and predicting such future news events using machine learning and data mining techniques. Our Pundit algorithm generalizes examples of causality pairs to infer a causality predictor. To obtain precise labeled causality examples, we mine 150 years of news articles, and apply semantic natural language modeling techniques to titles containing certain predefined causality patterns. For generalization, the model uses a vast amount of world knowledge ontologies mined from LinkedData, containing 200 datasets with approximately 20 billion relations. Empirical evaluation on real news articles shows that our Pundit algorithm reaches a human-level performance.

Most existing inductive learning algorithms work under the assumption that their training examples are already tagged. There are domains, however, where the tagging procedure requires significant computation resources or manual labor. In such cases, it may be beneficial for the learner to be active, intelligently selecting the examples for labeling with the goal of reducing the labeling cost. In this paper we present LSS-a lookahead algorithm for selective sampling of examples for nearest neighbor classifiers. The algorithm is looking for the example with the highest utility, taking its effect on the resulting classifier into account. Computing the expected utility of an example requires estimating the probability of its possible labels. We propose to use the random field model for this estimation. The LSS algorithm was evaluated empirically on seven real and artificial data sets, and its performance was compared to other selective sampling algorithms. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other methods in terms of average error rate and stability.

We address the task of Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) for noisy text. We present WikilinksNED, a large-scale NED dataset of text fragments from the web, which is significantly noisier and more challenging than existing newsbased datasets. To capture the limited and noisy local context surrounding each mention, we design a neural model and train it with a novel method for sampling informative negative examples. We also describe a new way of initializing word and entity embeddings that significantly improves performance. Our model significantly outperforms existing state-ofthe-art methods on WikilinksNED while achieving comparable performance on a smaller newswire dataset.