Diego Moussallem

Nikit Srivastava, Denis Kuchelev, Tatiana Moteu Ngoli et al.

This paper presents LOLA, a massively multilingual large language model trained on more than 160 languages using a sparse Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture. Our architectural and implementation choices address the challenge of harnessing linguistic diversity while maintaining efficiency and avoiding the common pitfalls of multilinguality. Our analysis of the evaluation results shows competitive performance in natural language generation and understanding tasks. Additionally, we demonstrate how the learned expert-routing mechanism exploits implicit phylogenetic linguistic patterns to potentially alleviate the curse of multilinguality. We provide an in-depth look at the training process, an analysis of the datasets, and a balanced exploration of the model's strengths and limitations. As an open-source model, LOLA promotes reproducibility and serves as a robust foundation for future research. Our findings enable the development of compute-efficient multilingual models with strong, scalable performance across languages.

Nikit Srivastava, Mengshi Ma, Daniel Vollmers et al.

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) simplifies querying vast amounts of knowledge stored in a graph-based model using natural language. However, the research has largely concentrated on English, putting non-English speakers at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, existing multilingual KGQA systems face challenges in achieving performance comparable to English systems, highlighting the difficulty of generating SPARQL queries from diverse languages. In this research, we propose a simplified approach to enhance multilingual KGQA systems by incorporating linguistic context and entity information directly into the processing pipeline of a language model. Unlike existing methods that rely on separate encoders for integrating auxiliary information, our strategy leverages a single, pretrained multilingual transformer-based language model to manage both the primary input and the auxiliary data. Our methodology significantly improves the language model's ability to accurately convert a natural language query into a relevant SPARQL query. It demonstrates promising results on the most recent QALD datasets, namely QALD-9-Plus and QALD-10. Furthermore, we introduce and evaluate our approach on Chinese and Japanese, thereby expanding the language diversity of the existing datasets.

Caglar Demir, Diego Moussallem, Stefan Heindorf et al.

Knowledge graph embedding research has mainly focused on the two smallest normed division algebras, $\mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{C}$. Recent results suggest that trilinear products of quaternion-valued embeddings can be a more effective means to tackle link prediction. In addition, models based on convolutions on real-valued embeddings often yield state-of-the-art results for link prediction. In this paper, we investigate a composition of convolution operations with hypercomplex multiplications. We propose the four approaches QMult, OMult, ConvQ and ConvO to tackle the link prediction problem. QMult and OMult can be considered as quaternion and octonion extensions of previous state-of-the-art approaches, including DistMult and ComplEx. ConvQ and ConvO build upon QMult and OMult by including convolution operations in a way inspired by the residual learning framework. We evaluated our approaches on seven link prediction datasets including WN18RR, FB15K-237 and YAGO3-10. Experimental results suggest that the benefits of learning hypercomplex-valued vector representations become more apparent as the size and complexity of the knowledge graph grows. ConvO outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on FB15K-237 in MRR, Hit@1 and Hit@3, while QMult, OMult, ConvQ and ConvO outperform state-of-the-approaches on YAGO3-10 in all metrics. Results also suggest that link prediction performances can be further improved via prediction averaging. To foster reproducible research, we provide an open-source implementation of approaches, including training and evaluation scripts as well as pretrained models.

Caglar Demir, Diego Moussallem, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo

Knowledge graph completion refers to predicting missing triples. Most approaches achieve this goal by predicting entities, given an entity and a relation. We predict missing triples via the relation prediction. To this end, we frame the relation prediction problem as a multi-label classification problem and propose a shallow neural model (SHALLOM) that accurately infers missing relations from entities. SHALLOM is analogous to C-BOW as both approaches predict a central token (p) given surrounding tokens ((s,o)). Our experiments indicate that SHALLOM outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on the FB15K-237 and WN18RR with margins of up to $3\%$ and $8\%$ (absolute), respectively, while requiring a maximum training time of 8 minutes on these datasets. We ensure the reproducibility of our results by providing an open-source implementation including training and evaluation scripts at {\url{https://github.com/dice-group/Shallom}.}

Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Michael Röder, Diego Moussallem et al.

The manual creation of gold standards for named entity recognition and entity linking is time- and resource-intensive. Moreover, recent works show that such gold standards contain a large proportion of mistakes in addition to being difficult to maintain. We hence present BENGAL, a novel automatic generation of such gold standards as a complement to manually created benchmarks. The main advantage of our benchmarks is that they can be readily generated at any time. They are also cost-effective while being guaranteed to be free of annotation errors. We compare the performance of 11 tools on benchmarks in English generated by BENGAL and on 16benchmarks created manually. We show that our approach can be ported easily across languages by presenting results achieved by 4 tools on both Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. Overall, our results suggest that our automatic benchmark generation approach can create varied benchmarks that have characteristics similar to those of existing benchmarks. Our approach is open-source. Our experimental results are available at http://faturl.com/bengalexpinlg and the code at https://github.com/dice-group/BENGAL.

Daniel Vollmers, Hamada M. Zahera, Diego Moussallem et al.

Entity Linking involves detecting and linking entity mentions in natural language texts to a knowledge graph. Traditional methods use a two-step process with separate models for entity recognition and disambiguation, which can be computationally intensive and less effective. We propose a fine-tuned model that jointly integrates entity recognition and disambiguation in a unified framework. Furthermore, our approach leverages large language models to enrich the context of entity mentions, yielding better performance in entity disambiguation. We evaluated our approach on benchmark datasets and compared with several baselines. The evaluation results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-domain datasets.

Daniel Vollmers, Rricha Jalota, Diego Moussallem et al.

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) systems are based on machine learning algorithms, requiring thousands of question-answer pairs as training examples or natural language processing pipelines that need module fine-tuning. In this paper, we present a novel QA approach, dubbed TeBaQA. Our approach learns to answer questions based on graph isomorphisms from basic graph patterns of SPARQL queries. Learning basic graph patterns is efficient due to the small number of possible patterns. This novel paradigm reduces the amount of training data necessary to achieve state-of-the-art performance. TeBaQA also speeds up the domain adaption process by transforming the QA system development task into a much smaller and easier data compilation task. In our evaluation, TeBaQA achieves state-of-the-art performance on QALD-8 and delivers comparable results on QALD-9 and LC-QuAD v1. Additionally, we performed a fine-grained evaluation on complex queries that deal with aggregation and superlative questions as well as an ablation study, highlighting future research challenges.

Diego Moussallem, Dwaraknath Gnaneshwar, Thiago Castro Ferreira et al.

The RDF-to-text task has recently gained substantial attention due to continuous growth of Linked Data. In contrast to traditional pipeline models, recent studies have focused on neural models, which are now able to convert a set of RDF triples into text in an end-to-end style with promising results. However, English is the only language widely targeted. We address this research gap by presenting NABU, a multilingual graph-based neural model that verbalizes RDF data to German, Russian, and English. NABU is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, uses an encoder inspired by Graph Attention Networks and a Transformer as decoder. Our approach relies on the fact that knowledge graphs are language-agnostic and they hence can be used to generate multilingual text. We evaluate NABU in monolingual and multilingual settings on standard benchmarking WebNLG datasets. Our results show that NABU outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on English with 66.21 BLEU, and achieves consistent results across all languages on the multilingual scenario with 56.04 BLEU.

Diego Moussallem

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has recently seen outstanding progress, catalysed by the release of different Neural Network (NN) architectures. Neural-based approaches have proven effective by significantly increasing the output quality of a large number of automated solutions for NLP tasks (Belinkov and Glass, 2019). Despite these notable advancements, dealing with entities still poses a difficult challenge as they are rarely seen in training data. Entities can be classified into two groups, i.e., proper nouns and common nouns. Proper nouns are also known as Named Entities (NE) and correspond to the name of people, organizations, or locations, e.g., John, WHO, or Canada. Common nouns describe classes of objects, e.g., spoon or cancer. Both types of entities can be found in a Knowledge Graph (KG). Recent work has successfully exploited the contribution of KGs in NLP tasks, such as Natural Language Inference (NLI) (KM et al.,2018) and Question Answering (QA) (Sorokin and Gurevych, 2018). Only a few works had exploited the benefits of KGs in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) when the work presented herein began. Additionally, few works had studied the contribution of KGs to Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. Moreover, the multilinguality also remained an open research area in these respective tasks (Young et al., 2018). In this thesis, we focus on the use of KGs for machine translation and the generation of texts to deal with the problems caused by entities and consequently enhance the quality of automatically generated texts.

Tommaso Soru, Edgard Marx, André Valdestilhas et al.

We argue that "Question Answering with Knowledge Base" and "Question Answering over Linked Data" are currently two instances of the same problem, despite one explicitly declares to deal with Linked Data. We point out the lack of existing methods to evaluate question answering on datasets which exploit external links to the rest of the cloud or share common schema. To this end, we propose the creation of new evaluation settings to leverage the advantages of the Semantic Web to achieve AI-complete question answering.

Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Diego Moussallem, Lorenz Bühmann

With the ever-growing generation of data for the Semantic Web comes an increasing demand for this data to be made available to non-semantic Web experts. One way of achieving this goal is to translate the languages of the Semantic Web into natural language. We present LD2NL, a framework for verbalizing the three key languages of the Semantic Web, i.e., RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. Our framework is based on a bottom-up approach to verbalization. We evaluated LD2NL in an open survey with 86 persons. Our results suggest that our framework can generate verbalizations that are close to natural languages and that can be easily understood by non-experts. Therewith, it enables non-domain experts to interpret Semantic Web data with more than 91\% of the accuracy of domain experts.

Diego Moussallem, Matthias Wauer, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo

A large number of machine translation approaches have recently been developed to facilitate the fluid migration of content across languages. However, the literature suggests that many obstacles must still be dealt with to achieve better automatic translations. One of these obstacles is lexical and syntactic ambiguity. A promising way of overcoming this problem is using Semantic Web technologies. This article is an extended abstract of our systematic review on machine translation approaches that rely on Semantic Web technologies for improving the translation of texts. Overall, we present the challenges and opportunities in the use of Semantic Web technologies in Machine Translation. Moreover, our research suggests that while Semantic Web technologies can enhance the quality of machine translation outputs for various problems, the combination of both is still in its infancy.

Diego Moussallem, Mihael Arčan, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo et al.

While neural networks have been used extensively to make substantial progress in the machine translation task, they are known for being heavily dependent on the availability of large amounts of training data. Recent efforts have tried to alleviate the data sparsity problem by augmenting the training data using different strategies, such as back-translation. Along with the data scarcity, the out-of-vocabulary words, mostly entities and terminological expressions, pose a difficult challenge to Neural Machine Translation systems. In this paper, we hypothesize that knowledge graphs enhance the semantic feature extraction of neural models, thus optimizing the translation of entities and terminological expressions in texts and consequently leading to a better translation quality. We hence investigate two different strategies for incorporating knowledge graphs into neural models without modifying the neural network architectures. We also examine the effectiveness of our augmentation method to recurrent and non-recurrent (self-attentional) neural architectures. Our knowledge graph augmented neural translation model, dubbed KG-NMT, achieves significant and consistent improvements of +3 BLEU, METEOR and chrF3 on average on the newstest datasets between 2014 and 2018 for WMT English-German translation task.

Tommaso Soru, Edgard Marx, André Valdestilhas et al.

Research on question answering with knowledge base has recently seen an increasing use of deep architectures. In this extended abstract, we study the application of the neural machine translation paradigm for question parsing. We employ a sequence-to-sequence model to learn graph patterns in the SPARQL graph query language and their compositions. Instead of inducing the programs through question-answer pairs, we expect a semi-supervised approach, where alignments between questions and queries are built through templates. We argue that the coverage of language utterances can be expanded using late notable works in natural language generation.

Diego Moussallem, Ricardo Usbeck, Michael Röder et al.

A plethora of Entity Linking (EL) approaches has recently been developed. While many claim to be multilingual, the MAG (Multilingual AGDISTIS) approach has been shown recently to outperform the state of the art in multilingual EL on 7 languages. With this demo, we extend MAG to support EL in 40 different languages, including especially low-resources languages such as Ukrainian, Greek, Hungarian, Croatian, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean. Our demo relies on online web services which allow for an easy access to our entity linking approaches and can disambiguate against DBpedia and Wikidata. During the demo, we will show how to use MAG by means of POST requests as well as using its user-friendly web interface. All data used in the demo is available at https://hobbitdata.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/agdistis/

Thiago Castro Ferreira, Diego Moussallem, Ákos Kádár et al.

Traditionally, Referring Expression Generation (REG) models first decide on the form and then on the content of references to discourse entities in text, typically relying on features such as salience and grammatical function. In this paper, we present a new approach (NeuralREG), relying on deep neural networks, which makes decisions about form and content in one go without explicit feature extraction. Using a delexicalized version of the WebNLG corpus, we show that the neural model substantially improves over two strong baselines. Data and models are publicly available.

Tommaso Soru, Stefano Ruberto, Diego Moussallem et al.

Knowledge Graph Embedding methods aim at representing entities and relations in a knowledge base as points or vectors in a continuous vector space. Several approaches using embeddings have shown promising results on tasks such as link prediction, entity recommendation, question answering, and triplet classification. However, only a few methods can compute low-dimensional embeddings of very large knowledge bases without needing state-of-the-art computational resources. In this paper, we propose KG2Vec, a simple and fast approach to Knowledge Graph Embedding based on the skip-gram model. Instead of using a predefined scoring function, we learn it relying on Long Short-Term Memories. We show that our embeddings achieve results comparable with the most scalable approaches on knowledge graph completion as well as on a new metric. Yet, KG2Vec can embed large graphs in lesser time by processing more than 250 million triples in less than 7 hours on common hardware.

Diego Moussallem, Thiago Castro Ferreira, Marcos Zampieri et al.

The generation of natural language from Resource Description Framework (RDF) data has recently gained significant attention due to the continuous growth of Linked Data. A number of these approaches generate natural language in languages other than English, however, no work has been proposed to generate Brazilian Portuguese texts out of RDF. We address this research gap by presenting RDF2PT, an approach that verbalizes RDF data to Brazilian Portuguese language. We evaluated RDF2PT in an open questionnaire with 44 native speakers divided into experts and non-experts. Our results suggest that RDF2PT is able to generate text which is similar to that generated by humans and can hence be easily understood.

Diego Moussallem, Mohamed Ahmed Sherif, Diego Esteves et al.

In this paper, we describe the LIDIOMS data set, a multilingual RDF representation of idioms currently containing five languages: English, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. The data set is intended to support natural language processing applications by providing links between idioms across languages. The underlying data was crawled and integrated from various sources. To ensure the quality of the crawled data, all idioms were evaluated by at least two native speakers. Herein, we present the model devised for structuring the data. We also provide the details of linking LIDIOMS to well-known multilingual data sets such as BabelNet. The resulting data set complies with best practices according to Linguistic Linked Open Data Community.

Diego Moussallem, Matthias Wauer, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo

A large number of machine translation approaches have recently been developed to facilitate the fluid migration of content across languages. However, the literature suggests that many obstacles must still be dealt with to achieve better automatic translations. One of these obstacles is lexical and syntactic ambiguity. A promising way of overcoming this problem is using Semantic Web technologies. This article presents the results of a systematic review of machine translation approaches that rely on Semantic Web technologies for translating texts. Overall, our survey suggests that while Semantic Web technologies can enhance the quality of machine translation outputs for various problems, the combination of both is still in its infancy.

Sandro A. Coelho, Diego Moussallem, Gustavo C. Publio et al.

Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) systems have recently been widely researched to deal with the significant growth of the Web. NERD systems are crucial for several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as summarization, understanding, and machine translation. However, there is no standard interface specification, i.e. these systems may vary significantly either for exporting their outputs or for processing the inputs. Thus, when a given company desires to implement more than one NERD system, the process is quite exhaustive and prone to failure. In addition, industrial solutions demand critical requirements, e.g., large-scale processing, completeness, versatility, and licenses. Commonly, these requirements impose a limitation, making good NERD models to be ignored by companies. This paper presents TANKER, a distributed architecture which aims to overcome scalability, reliability and failure tolerance limitations related to industrial needs by combining NERD systems. To this end, TANKER relies on a micro-services oriented architecture, which enables agile development and delivery of complex enterprise applications. In addition, TANKER provides a standardized API which makes possible to combine several NERD systems at once.

Tommaso Soru, Edgard Marx, Diego Moussallem et al.

In the last years, the Linked Data Cloud has achieved a size of more than 100 billion facts pertaining to a multitude of domains. However, accessing this information has been significantly challenging for lay users. Approaches to problems such as Question Answering on Linked Data and Link Discovery have notably played a role in increasing information access. These approaches are often based on handcrafted and/or statistical models derived from data observation. Recently, Deep Learning architectures based on Neural Networks called seq2seq have shown to achieve state-of-the-art results at translating sequences into sequences. In this direction, we propose Neural SPARQL Machines, end-to-end deep architectures to translate any natural language expression into sentences encoding SPARQL queries. Our preliminary results, restricted on selected DBpedia classes, show that Neural SPARQL Machines are a promising approach for Question Answering on Linked Data, as they can deal with known problems such as vocabulary mismatch and perform graph pattern composition.

Diego Moussallem, Ricardo Usbeck, Michael Röder et al.

Entity linking has recently been the subject of a significant body of research. Currently, the best performing approaches rely on trained mono-lingual models. Porting these approaches to other languages is consequently a difficult endeavor as it requires corresponding training data and retraining of the models. We address this drawback by presenting a novel multilingual, knowledge-based agnostic and deterministic approach to entity linking, dubbed MAG. MAG is based on a combination of context-based retrieval on structured knowledge bases and graph algorithms. We evaluate MAG on 23 data sets and in 7 languages. Our results show that the best approach trained on English datasets (PBOH) achieves a micro F-measure that is up to 4 times worse on datasets in other languages. MAG, on the other hand, achieves state-of-the-art performance on English datasets and reaches a micro F-measure that is up to 0.6 higher than that of PBOH on non-English languages.

Diego Moussallem, Ricardo Choren

This paper introduces a novel approach to tackle the existing gap on message translations in dialogue systems. Currently, submitted messages to the dialogue systems are considered as isolated sentences. Thus, missing context information impede the disambiguation of homographs words in ambiguous sentences. Our approach solves this disambiguation problem by using concepts over existing ontologies.