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The design and delivering of platforms for online education is fostering increasingly intense research. Scaling up education online brings new emerging needs related with hardly manageable classes, overwhelming content alternatives, and academic dishonesty while interacting remotely, as examples. However, with the impressive progress of the data mining and machine learning fields, combined with the large amounts of learning-related data and high-performance computing, it has been possible to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of learning and teaching online. Methods at the analytical and algorithmic levels are constantly being developed and hybrid approaches are receiving an increasing attention. Recent methods are analyzing not only the online traces left by students a posteriori, but also the extent to which this data can be turned into actionable insights and models, to support the above needs in a computationally efficient, adaptive and timely way. In this paper, we present relevant open challenges lying at the intersection between the machine learning and educational communities, that need to be addressed to further develop the field of intelligent systems for online education. Several areas of research in this field are identified, such as data availability and sharing, time-wise and multi-modal data modelling, generalizability, fairness, explainability, interpretability, privacy, and ethics behind models delivered for supporting education. Practical challenges and recommendations for possible research directions are provided for each of them, paving the way for future advances in this field.

Ontologies contain an abundance of concepts, are frequently structured as hierarchies, and can cover different domains of knowledge. Polysemous concepts need to be disambiguated for annotation purposes, for example, a concept such as depression has a different meaning in the fields of psychology and economics. In this paper, we introduce the use of the maximum mean discrepancy to indicate whether sets of concepts sharing the same meaning should be merged. This method is a novel approach to ontology maintenance because it provides an objective metric that supports the decision-making of subject matter experts during the concept evaluation process. Our objective is thus to assist ontology maintenance, in particular the organization of concepts, through an analysis framework that gives insights into the polysemy of concepts.

Materials are either enabler or bottleneck for the vast majority of technological innovations. The digitization of materials and processes is mandatory to create live production environments which represent physical entities and their aggregations and thus allow to represent, share, and understand materials changes. However, a common standard formalization for materials knowledge in the form of taxonomies, ontologies, or knowledge graphs has not been achieved yet. This paper sketches the efforts in modelling an ontology prototype to describe Materials Science experiments. It describes what is expected from the ontology by introducing a use case where a process chain driven by the ontology enables the curation and understanding of experiments.

Document exploration in archives is often challenging due to the lack of organization in topic-based categories. Moreover, archival records only provide short text which is often insufficient for capturing the semantic. This paper proposes and explores a dataless categorization approach that utilizes word embeddings and TF-IDF to categorize archival documents. Additionally, it introduces a visual approach built on top of the word embeddings to enhance the exploration of data. Preliminary results suggest that current vector representations alone do not provide enough external knowledge to solve this task.

The continuous growth of scientific literature brings innovations and, at the same time, raises new challenges. One of them is related to the fact that its analysis has become difficult due to the high volume of published papers for which manual effort for annotations and management is required. Novel technological infrastructures are needed to help researchers, research policy makers, and companies to time-efficiently browse, analyse, and forecast scientific research. Knowledge graphs i.e., large networks of entities and relationships, have proved to be effective solution in this space. Scientific knowledge graphs focus on the scholarly domain and typically contain metadata describing research publications such as authors, venues, organizations, research topics, and citations. However, the current generation of knowledge graphs lacks of an explicit representation of the knowledge presented in the research papers. As such, in this paper, we present a new architecture that takes advantage of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning methods for extracting entities and relationships from research publications and integrates them in a large-scale knowledge graph. Within this research work, we i) tackle the challenge of knowledge extraction by employing several state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing and Text Mining tools, ii) describe an approach for integrating entities and relationships generated by these tools, iii) show the advantage of such an hybrid system over alternative approaches, and vi) as a chosen use case, we generated a scientific knowledge graph including 109,105 triples, extracted from 26,827 abstracts of papers within the Semantic Web domain. As our approach is general and can be applied to any domain, we expect that it can facilitate the management, analysis, dissemination, and processing of scientific knowledge., Accepted for publication in Future Generation Computer Systems journal - Special Issue on Machine Learning and Knowledge Graphs

Scientific knowledge has been traditionally disseminated and preserved through research articles published in journals, conference proceedings, and online archives. However, this article-centric paradigm has been often criticized for not allowing to automatically process, categorize, and reason on this knowledge. An alternative vision is to generate a semantically rich and interlinked description of the content of research publications. In this paper, we present the Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Graph (AI-KG), a large-scale automatically generated knowledge graph that describes 820K research entities. AI-KG includes about 14M RDF triples and 1.2M reified statements extracted from 333K research publications in the field of AI, and describes 5 types of entities (tasks, methods, metrics, materials, others) linked by 27 relations. AI-KG has been designed to support a variety of intelligent services for analyzing and making sense of research dynamics, supporting researchers in their daily job, and helping to inform decision-making in funding bodies and research policymakers. AI-KG has been generated by applying an automatic pipeline that extracts entities and relationships using three tools: DyGIE++, Stanford CoreNLP, and the CSO Classifier. It then integrates and filters the resulting triples using a combination of deep learning and semantic technologies in order to produce a high-quality knowledge graph. This pipeline was evaluated on a manually crafted gold standard, yielding competitive results. AI-KG is available under CC BY 4.0 and can be downloaded as a dump or queried via a SPARQL endpoint.

In this paper, we present a preliminary approach that uses a set of NLP and Deep Learning methods for extracting entities and relationships from research publications and then integrates them in a Knowledge Graph. More specifically, we (i) tackle the challenge of knowledge extraction by employing several state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing and Text Mining tools, (ii) describe an approach for integrating entities and relationships generated by these tools, and (iii) analyse an automatically generated Knowledge Graph including 10,425 entities and 25,655 relationships in the field of Semantic Web.

Knowledge graphs (KG) are large network of entities and relationships, tipically expressed as RDF triples, relevant to a specific domain or an organization. Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) focus on the scholarly domain and typically contain metadata describing research publications such as authors, venues, organizations, research topics, and citations. The next big challenge in this field regards the generation of SKGs that also contain a explicit representation of the knowledge presented in research publications. In this paper, we present a preliminary approach that uses a set of NLP and Deep Learning methods for extracting entities and relationships from research publications and then integrates them in a KG. More specifically, we i) tackle the challenge of knowledge extraction by employing several state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing and Text Mining tools, ii) describe an approach for integrating entities and relationships generated by these tools, iii) analyse an automatically generated Knowledge Graph including 10, 425 entities and 25, 655 relationships derived from 12, 007 publications in the field of Semantic Web, and iv) discuss how Deep Learning methods can be applied to overcome some limitations of the current techniques.