Jacopo de Berardinis

Jacopo de Berardinis, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Andrea Poltronieri et al.

The annotation of music content is a complex process to represent due to its inherent multifaceted, subjectivity, and interdisciplinary nature. Numerous systems and conventions for annotating music have been developed as independent standards over the past decades. Little has been done to make them interoperable, which jeopardises cross-corpora studies as it requires users to familiarise with a multitude of conventions. Most of these systems lack the semantic expressiveness needed to represent the complexity of the musical language and cannot model multi-modal annotations originating from audio and symbolic sources. In this article, we introduce the Music Annotation Pattern, an Ontology Design Pattern (ODP) to homogenise different annotation systems and to represent several types of musical objects (e.g. chords, patterns, structures). This ODP preserves the semantics of the object's content at different levels and temporal granularity. Moreover, our ODP accounts for multi-modality upfront, to describe annotations derived from different sources, and it is the first to enable the integration of music datasets at a large scale.

Gabriella Pizzuto, Jacopo de Berardinis, Louis Longley et al.

Accelerating material discovery has tremendous societal and industrial impact, particularly for pharmaceuticals and clean energy production. Many experimental instruments have some degree of automation, facilitating continuous running and higher throughput. However, it is common that sample preparation is still carried out manually. This can result in researchers spending a significant amount of their time on repetitive tasks, which introduces errors and can prohibit production of statistically relevant data. Crystallisation experiments are common in many chemical fields, both for purification and in polymorph screening experiments. The initial step often involves a solubility screen of the molecule; that is, understanding whether molecular compounds have dissolved in a particular solvent. This usually can be time consuming and work intensive. Moreover, accurate knowledge of the precise solubility limit of the molecule is often not required, and simply measuring a threshold of solubility in each solvent would be sufficient. To address this, we propose a novel cascaded deep model that is inspired by how a human chemist would visually assess a sample to determine whether the solid has completely dissolved in the solution. In this paper, we design, develop, and evaluate the first fully autonomous solubility screening framework, which leverages state-of-the-art methods for image segmentation and convolutional neural networks for image classification. To realise that, we first create a dataset comprising different molecules and solvents, which is collected in a real-world chemistry laboratory. We then evaluated our method on the data recorded through an eye-in-hand camera mounted on a seven degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator, and show that our model can achieve 99.13% test accuracy across various setups.

Bohui Zhang, Valentina Anita Carriero, Katrin Schreiberhuber et al.

Ontology engineering (OE) in large projects poses a number of challenges arising from the heterogeneous backgrounds of the various stakeholders, domain experts, and their complex interactions with ontology designers. This multi-party interaction often creates systematic ambiguities and biases from the elicitation of ontology requirements, which directly affect the design, evaluation and may jeopardise the target reuse. Meanwhile, current OE methodologies strongly rely on manual activities (e.g., interviews, discussion pages). After collecting evidence on the most crucial OE activities, we introduce \textbf{OntoChat}, a framework for conversational ontology engineering that supports requirement elicitation, analysis, and testing. By interacting with a conversational agent, users can steer the creation of user stories and the extraction of competency questions, while receiving computational support to analyse the overall requirements and test early versions of the resulting ontologies. We evaluate OntoChat by replicating the engineering of the Music Meta Ontology, and collecting preliminary metrics on the effectiveness of each component from users. We release all code at https://github.com/King-s-Knowledge-Graph-Lab/OntoChat.

Jacopo de Berardinis, Valentina Anita Carriero, Albert Meroño-Peñuela et al.

The semantic description of music metadata is a key requirement for the creation of music datasets that can be aligned, integrated, and accessed for information retrieval and knowledge discovery. It is nonetheless an open challenge due to the complexity of musical concepts arising from different genres, styles, and periods -- standing to benefit from a lingua franca to accommodate various stakeholders (musicologists, librarians, data engineers, etc.). To initiate this transition, we introduce the Music Meta ontology, a rich and flexible semantic model to describe music metadata related to artists, compositions, performances, recordings, and links. We follow eXtreme Design methodologies and best practices for data engineering, to reflect the perspectives and the requirements of various stakeholders into the design of the model, while leveraging ontology design patterns and accounting for provenance at different levels (claims, links). After presenting the main features of Music Meta, we provide a first evaluation of the model, alignments to other schema (Music Ontology, DOREMUS, Wikidata), and support for data transformation.

Yihang Zhao, Bohui Zhang, Xi Hu et al.

Past ontology requirements engineering (ORE) has primarily relied on manual methods, such as interviews and collaborative forums, to gather user requirements from domain experts, especially in large projects. Current OntoChat offers a framework for ORE that utilises large language models (LLMs) to streamline the process through four key functions: user story creation, competency question (CQ) extraction, CQ filtration and analysis, and ontology testing support. In OntoChat, users are expected to prompt the chatbot to generate user stories. However, preliminary evaluations revealed that they struggle to do this effectively. To address this issue, we experimented with a research method called participatory prompting, which involves researcher-mediated interactions to help users without deep knowledge of LLMs use the chatbot more effectively. This participatory prompting user study produces pre-defined prompt templates based on user queries, focusing on creating and refining personas, goals, scenarios, sample data, and data resources for user stories. These refined user stories will subsequently be converted into CQs.

George Hannah, Jacopo de Berardinis, Terry R. Payne et al.

A large volume of XML data is produced in experiments carried out by robots in laboratories. In order to support the interoperability of data between labs, there is a motivation to translate the XML data into a knowledge graph. A key stage of this process is the enrichment of the XML schema to lay the foundation of an ontology schema. To achieve this, we present the RELRaE framework, a framework that employs large language models in different stages to extract and accurately label the relationships implicitly present in the XML schema. We investigate the capability of LLMs to accurately generate these labels and then evaluate them. Our work demonstrates that LLMs can be effectively used to support the generation of relationship labels in the context of lab automation, and that they can play a valuable role within semi-automatic ontology generation frameworks more generally.

Reham Alharbi, Valentina Tamma, Terry R. Payne et al.

Competency Questions (CQs) are pivotal in knowledge engineering, guiding the design, validation, and testing of ontologies. A number of diverse formulation approaches have been proposed in the literature, ranging from completely manual to Large Language Model (LLM) driven ones. However, attempts to characterise the outputs of these approaches and their systematic comparison are scarce. This paper presents an empirical comparative evaluation of three distinct CQ formulation approaches: manual formulation by ontology engineers, instantiation of CQ patterns, and generation using state of the art LLMs. We generate CQs using each approach from a set of requirements for cultural heritage, and assess them across different dimensions: degree of acceptability, ambiguity, relevance, readability and complexity. Our contribution is twofold: (i) the first multi-annotator dataset of CQs generated from the same source using different methods; and (ii) a systematic comparison of the characteristics of the CQs resulting from each approach. Our study shows that different CQ generation approaches have different characteristics and that LLMs can be used as a way to initially elicit CQs, however these are sensitive to the model used to generate CQs and they generally require a further refinement step before they can be used to model requirements.

Ioannis Reklos, Jacopo de Berardinis, Elena Simperl et al.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store human knowledge in the form of entities (nodes) and relations, and are used extensively in various applications. KG embeddings are an effective approach to addressing tasks like knowledge discovery, link prediction, and reasoning. This is often done by allocating and learning embedding tables for all or a subset of the entities. As this scales linearly with the number of entities, learning embedding models in real-world KGs with millions of nodes can be computationally intractable. To address this scalability problem, our model, PathE, only allocates embedding tables for relations (which are typically orders of magnitude fewer than the entities) and requires less than 25% of the parameters of previous parameter efficient methods. Rather than storing entity embeddings, we learn to compute them by leveraging multiple entity-relation paths to contextualise individual entities within triples. Evaluated on four benchmarks, PathE achieves state-of-the-art performance in relation prediction, and remains competitive in link prediction on path-rich KGs while training on consumer-grade hardware. We perform ablation experiments to test our design choices and analyse the sensitivity of the model to key hyper-parameters. PathE is efficient and cost-effective for relationally diverse and well-connected KGs commonly found in real-world applications.

Gianluca Apriceno, Valentina Tamma, Tania Bailoni et al.

The ability to reason with and integrate different sensory inputs is the foundation underpinning human intelligence and it is the reason for the growing interest in modelling multi-modal information within Knowledge Graphs. Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs extend traditional Knowledge Graphs by associating an entity with its possible modal representations, including text, images, audio, and videos, all of which are used to convey the semantics of the entity. Despite the increasing attention that Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs have received, there is a lack of consensus about the definitions and modelling of modalities, whose definition is often determined by application domains. In this paper, we propose a novel ontology design pattern that captures the separation of concerns between an entity (and the information it conveys), whose semantics can have different manifestations across different media, and its realisation in terms of a physical information entity. By introducing this abstract model, we aim to facilitate the harmonisation and integration of different existing multi-modal ontologies which is crucial for many intelligent applications across different domains spanning from medicine to digital humanities.

Jacopo de Berardinis, Gabriella Pizzuto, Francesco Lanza et al.

With advances in the field of machine learning, precisely algorithms for recommendation systems, robot assistants are envisioned to become more present in the hospitality industry. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has also highlighted the need to have more service robots in our everyday lives, to minimise the risk of human to-human transmission. One such example would be coffee shops, which have become intrinsic to our everyday lives. However, serving an excellent cup of coffee is not a trivial feat as a coffee blend typically comprises rich aromas, indulgent and unique flavours and a lingering aftertaste. Our work addresses this by proposing a computational model which recommends optimal coffee beans resulting from the user's preferences. Specifically, given a set of coffee bean properties (objective features), we apply different supervised learning techniques to predict coffee qualities (subjective features). We then consider an unsupervised learning method to analyse the relationship between coffee beans in the subjective feature space. Evaluated on a real coffee beans dataset based on digitised reviews, our results illustrate that the proposed computational model gives up to 92.7 percent recommendation accuracy for coffee beans prediction. From this, we propose how this computational model can be deployed on a service robot to reliably predict customers' coffee bean preferences, starting from the user inputting their coffee preferences to the robot recommending the coffee beans that best meet the user's likings.