[CSEE Talk] [Csee-faculty-research] PhD defense: Varish Mulwad -- Inferring the Semantics of Tables

[Milton Halem]

Tim,
Unfortunately, Yelena and I are at an all day NSF IUCRC Director's 
meeting on Jan. 8. Since his talk is at 8:00 AM it may be possible for 
us to follow  his presentation and possibly with skype see it, if we had 
a number to  dial into.  In case this is not possible, wish Varish our 
best for a  successful defense.
Regards.
Milt


On 12/29/14 4:56 PM, Tim Finin wrote:
> Dissertation Defense
>
>              TABEL -- A Domain Independent and Extensible
>             Framework for Inferring the Semantics of Tables
>
>                       Varish Vyankatesh Mulwad
>
>             8:00am Thursday, 8 January 2015, ITE325b, UMBC
>
> Tables are an integral part of documents, reports and Web pages in
> many scientific and technical domains, compactly encoding important
> information that can be difficult to express in text. Table-like
> structures outside documents, such as spreadsheets, CSV files, log
> files and databases, are widely used to represent and share
> information. However, tables remain beyond the scope of regular text
> processing systems which often treat them like free text.
>
> This dissertation presents TABEL -- a domain independent and
> extensible framework to infer the semantics of tables and represent
> them as RDF Linked Data. TABEL captures the intended meaning of a
> table by mapping header cells to classes, data cell values to existing
> entities and pair of columns to relations from an given ontology and
> knowledge base. The core of the framework consists of a module that
> represents a table as a graphical model to jointly infer the semantics
> of headers, data cells and relation between headers. We also introduce
> a novel Semantic Message Passing scheme, which incorporates semantics
> into message passing, to perform joint inference over the
> probabilistic graphical model. We also develop and explore a
> "human-in-the-loop" paradigm, presenting plausible models of user
> interaction with our framework and its impact on the quality of
> inferred semantics.
>
> We present techniques that are both extensible and domain
> agnostic. Our framework supports the addition of preprocessing modules
> without affecting existing ones, making TABEL extensible. It also
> allows background knowledge bases to be adapted and changed based on
> the domains of the tables, thus making it domain independent. We
> demonstrate the extensibility and domain independence of our
> techniques by developing an application of TABEL in the healthcare
> domain. We develop a proof of concept for an application to generate
> meta-analysis reports automatically, which is built on top of the
> semantics inferred from tables found in medical literature.
>
> A thorough evaluation with experiments over dataset of tables from the
> Web and medical research reports presents promising results.
>
> Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (chair), Tim Oates, Anupam Joshi, Yun Peng,
> Indrajit Bhattacharya (IBM Research) and L. V. Subramaniam (IBM
> Research)
> -- 
> For info and options, see 
> http://lists.cs.umbc.edu/mailman/listinfo/csee-colloquium-out
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-- 
Milton Halem, Ph.D.
Research Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Dep't.
Exec. Mgr., Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research,
Director, Multicore Computational Center,
College of Engineering and Information Technology
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Ph: 410 455 2862    Cell: 240 472 7314 ITE Room 330
Fax: 410 455 3969 email: halem at umbc.edu
Distinguished Information Scientist, Emeritus
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Ph: 301 614 6598 email: Milton.Halem-1 at nasa.gov