Post on 16-Apr-2017
transcript
The domain as unifier, how focusing on social history can bring technical fields together
Marieke van Erpmarieke.van.erp@vu.nl
About me
• Researcher in the Computational Lexicology & Terminology Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Language Technology + Semantic Web
• Collaborations with humanities, cultural heritage & information professionals in CATCH, EU FP7 & CLARIAH projects
image source: http://www.bsbstaalbouw.nl/previews/2010/11/9/media_210_49423_media_210_49423_w600.jpg
Domains
(Social) History
Language Technology
Semantic Web
Language Technology
• aims to research & develop tools to extract information from text
• information retrieval, machine translation, deep reading
• majority of the datasets in the field are ‘current’ newspaper texts
• researchers are interested in finding out how their tool behaves in a different domain
Semantic Web
• aims to create a machine readable Web
• knowledge modelling, formats, knowledge representation, data sharing
• Linked Open Data cloud provides entry point to many structured data sources
• many more users could benefit from Semantic Web technology
(Social) History
• interested in:
• people
• events
• many historians are interested in dealing with:
• larger text corpora
• quantitative methods
image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/York_Pioneers'_social_re-union_St_George's_Hall,_Toronto,_March_3,_1911_(HS85-10-23694).jpg
Components(Social) HistoryLanguage
Technology
Semantic Webknowledge modelling &
representation
knowledge
knowledge
information extraction
event extraction
named entity recognition and linking
vocabularies
vocabularies
entity graphs
standardisation
people & events
statistics
structured data
structured data
• Goal of the project: interlink Rijksmuseum and Sound and Vision collections through events
• Digital Hermeneutics (History)
• Recognise events and participants in object descriptions (Language Technology)
• Model events and Narratives (Semantic Web)
• Van Den Akker, C., Legêne, S., Van Erp, M., Aroyo, L., Segers, R., van Der Meij, L., Van Ossenbruggen, J., Schreiber, G., Wielinga, B., Oomen, J. and Jacobs, G., 2011, June. Digital hermeneutics: Agora and the online understanding of cultural heritage. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Web Science Conference (p. 10). ACM.
Components
(Social) HistoryLanguage Technology
Semantic Web
knowledge modelling &
representation
event extraction
people & events
Not only useful for historians
• http://www.newsreader-project.eu • http://www.understandinglanguagebymachines.org/stories-and-world-views-as-a-
key-to-understanding-language/ • http://www.cltl.nl/projects/current-projects/visualizing-uncertainty-and-perspectives/
• How can computational tools help in analysing digitised biographies (History)
• Extract person names & information about persons from text (Language Technology)
• Model relationships between them (SemWeb)
A Prosopography of Dutch Ministers (1575-1815)
Components
(Social) HistoryLanguage Technology
Semantic Web
knowledge modelling &
representation
named entity recognition
people & what they did
relationship extraction
WP3
WP3
Components
(Social) HistoryLanguage Technology
Semantic Web
knowledge
knowledge modelling
information extraction
people & events
entity graphs
event extraction
vocabularies
How to make this happen?
image source: https://static.pexels.com/photos/7096/people-woman-coffee-meeting.jpg
Going forward
• What questions would you like to answer with Language Technology & Semantic Web?
• What awesome tools & skills do you have?
• What datasets do you have?
• How do you like your coffee?
image source: http://www.independent.ie/incoming/article31308951.ece/ALTERNATES/h342/tea.jpg