Re: type of http://dbpedia.org/page/Bachelor_of_Arts

Hi Heiko,

thanks for the prompt reply and the explanation.
However, the interesting thing is that these entities are clearly used with more than one sense (at least in the US culture), so the issue comes from this fact originally in my opinion.
I mentioned two cases here, but if you check you can see that all these types of entities (Degrees) have the same problem.

My suggestion (if that can help) is to identify such metonym cases and have a special approach: having different entities as the number of senses.

However, the Wikipedia page of such entities defines them as degrees…not sure if this can be useful to notice for you. 

Valentina

On 13 Oct 2014, at 09:03, Heiko Paulheim <heiko@informatik.uni-mannheim.de> wrote:

> Hi Valentina,
> 
> (and CCing the DBpedia discussion list)
> 
> this is an effect of the heuristic typing we employ in DBpedia [1]. It works correctly in many cases, and sometimes it fails - as for these examples (the classic tradeoff between coverage and precision). 
> 
> To briefly explain how the error comes into existence: we look at the distribution of types that occur for the ingoing properties of an untyped instance. For dbpedia:Bachelor_of_Arts, there are, among others, 208 ingoing properties with the predicate dbpedia-owl:almaMater (which is already questionable). For that predicate, 87.6% of the objects are of type dbpedia-owl:University. So we have a strong pattern, with many supporting statements, and we conclude that dbpedia:Bachelor_of_Arts is a university. That mechanism, as I said, works reasonable well, but sometimes fails at single instances, like this one. For dbpedia:Academic_degree, you'll find similar questionable statements involving that instace, that mislead the heuristic typing algorithm.
> 
> With the 2014 release, we further tried to reduce errors like these by filtering common nouns using WordNet before assigning types to instances, but both "Academic degree" and "Bachelor of Arts" escaped our nets here :-(
> 
> The public DBpedia endpoint loads both the infobox based types and the heuristic types. If you need a "clean" version, I advise you to set up a local endpoint and load only the infobox based types into it.
> 
> Best,
> Heiko
> 
> [1] http://www.heikopaulheim.com/documents/iswc2013.pdf
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Am 13.10.2014 02:42, schrieb Valentina Presutti:
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> I noticed that dbpedia:Bachelor_of_Arts, as well as other similar entities (dbpedia:Bachelor_of_Engineering, dbpedia:Bachelor_of_Science, etc.), is typed as dbpedia-owl:University
>> I would expect a type like “Academic Degree” but if you look at
>> dbpedia:Academic_Degree, its type is again dbpedia-owl:University
>> 
>> however, its definition is (according to dbpedia):
>> 
>> "An academic degree is a college or university diploma, often associated with a title and sometimes associated with an academic position, which is usually awarded in recognition of the recipient having either satisfactorily completed a prescribed course of study or having conducted a scholarly endeavour deemed worthy of his or her admission to the degree. The most common degrees awarded today are associate, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.”
>> 
>> Showing that there are at least two different meanings associated with the term: college/university and title.
>> I thing that different meanings should be separated so as to allow applications to refer to the different entities: a university or a title.
>> 
>> At least for me this causes errors in automatic relation extraction...
>> 
>> Wdyt?
>> 
>> Valentina
> 
> -- 
> Prof. Dr. Heiko Paulheim
> Data and Web Science Group
> University of Mannheim
> Phone: +49 621 181 2646
> B6, 26, Room C1.08
> D-68159 Mannheim
> 
> Mail: heiko@informatik.uni-mannheim.de
> Web: www.heikopaulheim.com