Seminar: Dr. Diana Maynard, Semantic technologies for mapping European research

Title: Semantic technologies for mapping European research: bridging the gap between policy and research

Abstract:

Mapping the structure of knowledge co-creation in key emerging areas of European research is a critical issue for policy makers, who want to analyse research impact and make strategic decisions. However, current methods for characterizing and visualizing the field have limitations concerning the changing nature of research, the differences in language and topical structure between policy and science topics, and the coverage of not just a single domain but a broad range of scientific and political issues that have widely differing characteristics. In this talk, I will outline the ontology-based approach we have developed in the KNOWMAK project, which aims to address the problems of mapping between heterogenous data sources with different vocabularies, while still maintaining a level of standardization necessary for summarising the information required to provide informative views about the highly dynamic science and technology landscape. In particular, I will focus on the topic mapping approach which performs advanced term extraction and expansion techniques using word embeddings, followed by a semantically-driven matching of documents with ontology topics. This will be accompanied by a demonstration of the recently released first public version of the KNOWMAK tool, showing how European knowledge production is distributed across different regions.

Bio:

Diana Maynard is a senior research fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK. She was born in Chertsey, Surrey, and spent her childhood in Surrey, Hampshire, Wiltshire and North Yorkshire. She acquired a BSc in Computational Linguistics and French from UMIST in 1995, an MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Manchester in 1996, and a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University in automatic term recognition in 2000. Her main interests are in information extraction, opinion mining, social media analysis, terminology and semantic web technologes. Since 2000 she has worked in the GATE team, where she leads the development of Sheffield's open-source multilingual Information Extraction tools, and has led research teams on a number of UK and EU projects. She is chair of the annual GATE training course and leads the GATE consultancy on IE and opinion mining. She has published extensively, organised a number of national and international conferences, workshops and tutorials, and has given a number of invited talks and keynote speeches.

Organisational information:

This particular meetup is part of a seminar series on Natural Language Processing funded by the Centre for Communication and Computing (CCC) at the University of Copenhagen. There will be refreshments from 16:30, the talk will start at 17:00.