PhD studentship: Ontology Reasoning with Texts

*** Apologies for cross posting. ***

PhD Research Project - Possible Funding for a Highly Qualified Student
Ontology Reasoning with Texts
University of Aberdeen

We find an abundance of information on the internet that is presented in
natural language, e.g. written English. Such information is “unstructured''
in the sense that it is not machine-readable, thus making it infeasible to
formally or automatically analyse for the purposes of information
extraction, querying, linking, or repurposing. Making natural language
machine readable would enable development of many different applications
with significant impact such as question-answering on the internet,
interactive dialogue systems, reasoning tools using natural language, text
summarisation, and others. There have been advances the last several years,
resulting in improved tools that parse and semantically represent text,
then process it into a machine-readable format, e.g. RDF, that is highly
suited to extraction, querying, linking, and so on. Thus, there exists a
processing “pipeline'' to take natural language into machine-readable
formats. While the pipeline functions, it is very limited.

The objective of this PhD project is to exploit the above “pipeline” so as
to extend the capabilities of current ontology reasoners with the feature
of reasoning with texts, with the assumption that the ontologies generated
from the texts inputs should be able to cover a given set of competency
questions.

The outcome of the project will be evaluated in terms of both performance
and quality with comparisons to state-of-the-art systems.

During the project, student will also be supervised on the methodology of
scientific research, experimenting, writing, presenting, team-working.

For further details:
http://qr.net/y2lc

Jeff Z. Pan:
http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/jeff.z.pan/pages/

Adam Wyner
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/ncs/people/profiles/azwyner