Grounded Natural Language Generation with Knowledge Graphs

Automation Bias is a well-studied phenomenon in social psychology that says humans have a tendency to overly trust the decisions of automated systems. This effect was on full display during last month’s Bing Chat launch keynote and Google Bard launch. As many sharp-eyed bloggers pointed out, both demos were riddled with examples of the LLM producing inaccurate and “hallucinated” facts. Everyone, including Bing in their keynote, recognizes that AI makes mistakes, but what was surprising here is that AI was so good at getting past all of the human reviewers–all of the engineers, product managers, marketers, PR folks, and execs that must have reviewed these examples for a high profile launch event that Satya Nadella described as the “third wave of the web”.

Factual accuracy is not part of the objective function that Large Language Models are designed and optimized on. Rather, they are trained on their ability to “blur” the web into a more abstract representation, which forms the basis of their remarkable skill in all manner of creative and artistic generation. That an LLM is able to generate any true statements at all is merely the coincidence of that statement appearing enough times in the training set that it becomes retained, not by explicit design.

It just so happens that there is a data structure that has been specifically designed to store facts at web-scale losslessly and with provenance: Knowledge Graphs. By guiding the generation of language with the “rails” of a Knowledge Graph, we can create hybrid systems that are provably accurate with trusted data provenance, while leveraging the LLM’s strong abilities in transforming text.

To see this, let’s go through some of the examples demoed in the Bing Chat keynote and see how they could have been improved with access to a Knowledge Graph.

Let’s Shop for TVs using Bing

In this example, Yusuf Medhi, Chief Consumer Marketing Officer for Microsoft, is demoing the new Bing’s ability to do interactive refinement of search results through dialogue. He asks Bing Chat for the query “top selling 65-inch TVs”.

Looks like a pretty decent response. While it’s difficult to fact-check Bing’s claim that these are the “top selling 65-inch TVs in 2023″ without access to private sales data, these ten results are at least TVs (more specifically TVs product lines/series) that have 65” models. For the sake of discussion, let’s give Bing the benefit of the doubt, and assume these are correct:

Next, Yusuf asks Bing “which of these is best for gaming?”

Bing Chat result for "which of these is best for gaming"

Seems pretty great right? From a quick visual scan, you can see the token “game” sprinkled liberally throughout the response. But look more closely. These responses are not at all a subset of “these” 65-inch TVs from the previous response! In fact, out of these 10 recommendations, only 3 of these are from the previous list. 7 have been swapped out:

This is where the demo of query refinement starts to break down. As you start to add more conditions to your query, the likelihood that someone has created a piece of content on the web that answers the specific question at the intersection of those conditions becomes exceedingly rare. I.e, the probability of a blog post existing for “best selling 65-inch TVs” is greater than the probability someone has created a blog post for the “best selling 65-inch TVs for gaming.

Notice that now, Bing is starting to return individual product model numbers instead of product lines or series. The LLM is definitely picking up on the input token “gaming” and blending in product numbers it has seen in gaming related content, but two of the recommendations, the “LG 65SM8600PUA” and “LG OLED65C8P”, have been discontinued and are no longer sold on the web (though you can find the 65SM8600PUA used on Amazon according to the Diffbot Knowledge Graph).

Are these the “best for gaming”? That’s subjective and hard to evaluate, but these results certainly cannot be the “best-selling in 2023” if they are not even available for sale, except on a used Amazon listing. The steelman argument could be that these were the best selling TVs back in 2021 when the LLM was trained, but the response says that these are in 2023.

Next, Yusuf asks “which one of these is the cheapest?”

Again, these results look great in the context of a demo if you don’t look too carefully at what they are saying.

If you are actually trying to use Bing to do product research though, and have specific reasons for wanting the TV to be 65-inches (maybe that’s how much space you have to work with on your living room wall, or that is something you have already decided on based on previous reviews), then they aren’t so great. We can see here that one of the TVs recommended is 55 inches. And again Bing loses the context from the previous questions, with only 1 out of the 5 recommendations being a subset of the prior results, seemingly there by coincidence.

Let’s Learn about Japanese Poets

I think this example was put into the keynote to show how Bing Chat can be used to do more exploratory discovery, as a contrast to goal-oriented task sessions, which to be fair is a pretty great use case for LLMs.

Yusuf asks Bing Chat simply “top japanese poets”

Again, this looks like a great result if you’re looking at the results with the mindset of a demo and not with the mindset of an actual learner trying to learn about Japanese poets. It certainly seems to come back faster and cleaner than the alternative of searching for an article on the web about famous Japanese poets written by an expert and dealing with the potentially jarring visual layout of visiting a new website. But is the underlying information correct?

Well, it is mostly correct. But the question is asking for top Japanese poets, and Gackt (which I admit having listened to his songs during my teenage years), being a famous Japanese rock star and pop group, is definitely no poet. Yes, he could have written a poem, backstage, after a jam session, during a moment of reflection, but there is no charitable common-sense interpretation of this answer where Gackt is one of the top 10 Japanese poets. Another nit with this response is that Eriko Kishida has no Wikipedia page (though she has IMDB credits for writing the lyrics of many children’s TV shows) yet Bing claims “according to Wikipedia”. By citing Wikipedia for these results, Bing confers a greater sense of authority to these results than they actually deserve.

A General Recipe for Grounded Language Generation using Knowledge Graphs

So, how could both of these examples been improved by using a Knowledge Graph?

First of all, it’s important to recognize that not all use cases of LLMs require or desire accuracy. Many of the most impressive examples of LLM and multi-modal LLM outputs are examples where creativity and “hallucination” create a lot of artistic value and present the user with novel blends of styles that they would not have thought of. We love stories about unicorns and pictures of avocado chairs.

But for use cases where accuracy matters, whether this is because of an intersection of hard constraints, a need for auditability / review, or for augmenting professional services knowledge work, Knowledge Graphs can be used as a “rail” to guide the generation of the natural language output.

For these applications, a common design pattern is emerging for grounded language generation:

The first step is using the structured data of the Knowledge Graph to enrich the natural language of the query with structured data. In the example of the TV shopping and Japanese poets, it is recognizing that the question aligns with an entity type that is available in the Knowledge Graph. In the TV example it is “type:Product” and in the poets example it is “type:Person“. Knowing the requested entity type of the question is very useful, allowing you to type-check the responses later, and even present result UIs that are optimized for that type. There is an extensive line of academic research in this vein and Diffbot provides tools for structuring natural language.

The Enrichment step is also where you might pull in any additional information about entities that are mentioned in the natural language question. For example, if the question is “What are alternatives to Slack?”, you’d want to pull in information from the Knowledge Graph about Slack, structured attributes as well as text descriptions so that the LLM has more text to work with. This is especially important if the question contains entities that are not so popular on the web, or only known about privately.

Using the now augmented input, formulate a prompt for the LLM that provides this context and specifies the expected type of entity that is desired (e.g. products, companies, people, poets). Prompt engineering is becoming more-and-more of its own skillset, so we won’t cover that in detail here, but will show some examples of Knowledge Graph prompts in a follow up post.

As we’ve seen in the above two examples, even with the desired type provided to the LLM, it can still generate inaccurate outputs. This is where the next step of KG-based verification comes in. You can look up each of the LLM-generated results in a Knowledge Graph and discard results that do not match on the desired type or required attributes. This would have allowed you to discard the 55″ TV from the product result (specs), discontinued and non-existent products, and the Japanese rock star (employment) from the list of poets. If you have confidence in the completeness of your Knowledge Graph, you can discard any LLM-generated responses that don’t appear in the knowledge graph or only use candidates from the knowledge graph during the enrichment stage in the prompt.

Another aspect in which the Knowledge Graph can help in the rectification of the results is in the presentation itself. A Knowledge Graph can provide provenance for where each of the recommendations in the response came from, separately. For some applications, you can even use the Knowledge Graph to limit which facts are returned to only those facts that are in the Knowledge Graph, so that you have 100% provenance for everything that is shown to the user. In this mode, you can consider the LLM as a intelligent “SELECT” clause on the Knowledge Graph that adaptively picks which columns to present in the user experience based on the query. For many use cases, such as comparison product shopping, a tabular presentation of the products showing the title, image, price, specs, etc is a lot more user friendly to deal with than text, which is why it is the design of most shopping sites. Next-gen LLM/KG hybrid systems should take the lessons learned from UX design but use the new capabilities of LLMs to create adaptive inputs and outputs.

The future of trustworthy AI systems lies in the synergy between LLMs and Knowledge Graphs and knowing when it’s appropriate to use both. By combining the creative power of LLMs and the factual index of Knowledge Graphs, we can build systems that not only inspire creativity, but can be relied on for knowledge workflows and mission-critical applications.

17 Uses of Natural Language Processing (NLP) In Business Settings

The Library of Alexandria was the pinnacle of the ancient world’s recorded knowledge. It’s estimated that it contained the scroll equivalent of 100,000 books. This was the culmination of thousands of years of knowledge that made it into the records of the time. Today, the Library of Congress holds much the same distinction, with over 170M items in its collection.

While impressive, those 170M items digitized could fit onto a shelf in your basement. Roughly 10 12 terabyte hard drives could contain the entirety.

For comparison, the average data center of today (there are 7.2M of them at last count) takes up an average of 100,000 square feet. Nearly every foot filled with storage.

With this much data, there’s no army of librarians in the whole world who could organize them…

Natural language processing refers to technologies and techniques that take unorganized data and provide meaning and structure at scale. Imagine taking a stack of documents on your desk, making them searchable, sortable, prioritizing them, or generating summaries for each. These are the sort of tasks natural language processing supports in business and research settings.

At Diffbot, we see a wide range of use cases using our benchmark-topping Natural Language API. We’ll work through some of these use cases as well as others supported by other technologies below.

Sentiment Analysis

These days, it seems as if nearly everyone online has an opinion (and is willing to share it widely). The velocity of social media, support ticket, and review data is astounding, and many teams have sought solutions to automate the understanding of these exchanges.

Sentiment analysis is one of the most widespread uses of natural language processing. This process involves determining how “positive” or “negative” a given text is. Common uses for sentiment analysis are wide ranging and include:

  • Buyer risk
  • Supplier risk
  • Market intelligence
  • Product intelligence (reviews)
  • Social media monitoring
  • Underwriting
  • Support ticket routing
  • Investment intelligence

While no natural language processing task is foolproof, studies show that analysts tend to agree with top-tier sentiment analysis services close to 85% of the time.

One categorical difference between sentiment analysis providers is that some provide a sentiment score for entire documents, while some providers can give you the sentiment of individual entities within the text. A second important factor about entity-level sentiment involves knowing how central an entity is to understanding the text. This measure is commonly called the “salience” of an entity.

Text Classification

Text classification can refer to a process internal to natural language processing tools in which text is grouped into related words and prepared for further analysis. Additionally, text (topic) classification can refer to the user output of greater business use.

The uses of text (topic) classification include ticket or call routing, news mention tracking, and providing contextuality to other natural language processing outputs. Text classification can function as an “operator” of sorts, routing requests to the person best suited to solve the issue.

Studies have shown that the average support worker can only handle around 20 support tickets a day. Text classification can dramatically increase the time before tickets reach the right support team member as well as provide this team member with context to solve an issue quickly. Salesforce has noted that 69% of high-performing support teams are considering the use of AI for ticket routing.

Additionally, you can think of text classification as one “building block” for understanding what is going on in bulk unstructured text. Text classification processes may also trigger additional natural language processing through identifying languages or topics that should be analyzed in a particular way.

Chatbots & Virtual Assistants

Loved by some, despised by others, chatbots form a viable way to direct informational conversations towards self service or human team members.

While historical chatbots have relied on makers plotting out ‘decision trees’ (e.g. a flow chart pattern where a specific input yields a specific choice), natural language processing allows chatbot users several distinct benefits:

  • The ability to input a nuanced request
  • The ability to type a request in informal writing
  • More intelligence judgment on when to hand off a call to an agent

As the quality of chatbot interactions has improved with advances in natural language processing, consumers have grown accustomed to dealing with them. The number of consumers willing to deal with chatbots doubled between 2018 and 2019. And more recently it has been reported that close to 70% of consumers prefer to deal with chatbots for answers to simple inquiries.

Text Extraction (Mining)

Text extraction is a crucial functionality in many natural language processing applications. This functionality involves pulling out key pieces of information from unstructured text. Key pieces of information could be entities (e.g. companies, people, email addresses, products), relationships, specifications, references to laws or any other mention of interest. A second function of text extraction can be to clean and standardize data. The same entity can be referenced in many different ways within a text, as pronouns, in shorthand, as grammatically possessive, and so forth.

Text extraction is often a “building block” for many other more advanced natural language processing tasks.

Text extraction plays a critical role in Diffbot’s AI-enabled web scraping products, allowing us to determine which pieces of information are most important on a wide variety of pages without human input as well as pull relevant facts into the world’s largest Knowledge Graph.

Machine Translation

Few organizations of size don’t interface with global suppliers, customers, regulators, or the public at large. “Human in the loop” global news tracking is often costly and reliant on recruiting individuals who can read all of the languages that could provide actionable intelligence for your organization.

Machine translation allows these processes to occur at scale, and refers to the natural language processing task of converting natural text in one language to another. This relies on understanding the context, being able to determine entities and relationships, as well as understanding the overall sentiment of a document.

While some natural language processing products center their offerings around machine translation, others simply standardize their output to a single language. Diffbot’s Natural Language API can take input in English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Norwegian, Danish or Swedish and standardize output into English.

Text Summarization

Text summarization is one of a handful of “generative” natural language processing tasks. Reliant on text extraction, classification, and sentiment analysis, text summarization takes a set of input text and summarizes it. Perhaps the most commonly utilized example of text summarization occurs when search results highlight a particular sentence within a document to answer a query.

Two main approaches are used for text summarizing natural language processing. The extraction approach finds a sentence(s) within a text that it believes coherently summarizes the main points of the document. The abstraction approach actually rewrites the input text, removing points it believes are less important and rephrasing to reduce length.

The primary benefit of text summarization is the preserving of time for end users. In cases like question answering in support or search, consumers utilize text summarization daily. Technical, medical, and legal settings also utilize text summarization to give a quick high-level view of the main points of a document.

Market Intelligence

Check out a media monitoring dashboard that combines Diffbot’s web scraping, Knowledge Graph, and natural language processing products above!

The range of data sources on consumers, suppliers, distributors, and competitors makes market intelligence incredibly ripe for disruption via natural language processing. Web data is a primary source for a wide range of inputs on market conditions, and the ability to provide meaning while absolving individuals from the need to read all underlying documents is a game changer.

Applied with web crawling, natural language processing can provide information on key market happenings such as mergers and acquisitions, key hires, funding rounds, new office openings, and changes in headcount. Other common market intelligence uses include sentiment analysis of reviews, summarization of financial, legal, or regulatory documents, among other uses.

Intent Classification

Intent classification is one of the most revenue-centered and actionable applications of natural language processing. In intent classification the input is direct communications from a prospect or customer. Using machine learning, intent classification tools can rate how “ready to buy” a given individual is during an interaction. This can prompt sales and marketing outreach, special offers, cross-selling, up-selling, and help with lead scoring.

Additionally, intent classification can help to route inquiries aimed at support or general queries like those related to billing. The ability to infer intentions and needs without even needing to prompt discussion members to answer specific questions enables for a faster and more frictionless experience for service providers and customers.

Urgency Detection

Urgency detection is related to intent classification, but with less focus on where a text indicates a writer is within a buying process. Urgency detection has been successfully used in cases such as law enforcement, humanitarian crises, and health care hotlines to “flag up” text that indicates a certain urgency threshold.

Because urgency detection is just one method — among others — in which communications can be routed or filtered, low or no supervision machine learning can often be used to prepare these functions. In instances in which an organization does not have the resources to field all requests, urgency detection can help them to prioritize the most urgent.

Speech Recognition

In today’s world of smart homes and mobile connectivity, speech recognition opens up the door to natural language processing away from written text. By focusing on high fidelity speech-to-text functionality, the range of documents that can be fed to natural language processing programs expands dramatically.

In 2020, an estimated 30% of all searches held a voice component. Applying natural language processing detailed in the other points in this guide is a huge opportunity for organizations providing speech-related capabilities.

Search Autocorrect and Autocomplete

Search autocorrect and complete may be the area most individuals deal with natural language processing most readily. In recent years, search on many ecommerce and knowledge base sites has been entirely rethought. The ability to quickly identify intent and pair it with an appropriate response can lead to better user experience, higher conversion rates, and more end data about what users want.

While 96% of major ecommerce sites employ autocorrect and/or autocomplete, major benchmarks find that close to 30% of these sites have severe usability issues. For some of the largest traffic volume sites on the web, this is a major opportunity to employ quality predictive search using cutting-edge natural language processing.

Social Media Monitoring

Of all media sources online, social can be the most overwhelming in velocity, range of tone and conversation type. Global organizations may need to field or monitor requests in many languages, on many platforms. Additionally, social media can provide useful inputs into external issues that may affect your organization, from geopolitical strife, to changing consumer opinion, to competitor intelligence.

On the customer service and sales fronts, 79% of consumers expect brands to respond within a day on social media requests. Recent studies have shown that across industries only 29% of brands regularly hit this mark. Additionally, the cost of finding new customers is 7x that of keeping existing customers, leading to increased need for intent monitoring and natural language processing of social media requests.

Web Data Extraction

Rule-based web data extraction simply doesn’t scale past a certain point. Unless you know the structure of a web page in advance (many of which are changing constantly), rules specified for which information is relevant to extract will break. This is where natural language processing comes into play.

Organizations like Diffbot apply natural language processing for web data extraction. By training natural language processing models around what information is likely useful by page type (e.g. product page, profile page, article page, discussion page, etc.), we can extract web data without pre-specified rules. This leads to resiliency in web crawling as well as enables us to expand the number of pages we can extract data from. This ability to crawl across many page types and continuously extract facts is what powers our Knowledge Graph. Interested in web data extraction? Be sure to check out our automatic extraction APIs or pre-extracted firmographic, demographic, and article data within our Knowledge Graph.

Machine Learning

See how ProQuo AI utilizes our web sourced Knowledge Graph to speed up predictive analytics

While machine learning is often an input to natural language processing tools, the output of natural language processing tools can also jumpstart machine learning projects. Using automatically structured data from the web can help you skip time-consuming and expensive annotation tasks.

We routinely see our Natural Language API as well as Knowledge Graph data — both enabled with natural language processing technology — utilized to jump start machine learning exercises. There are few training data sets as large as public web data. And the range of public web data types and topics makes it a great starting point for many, many machine learning journeys.

Threat Detection

See how FactMata uses Diffbot Knowledge Graph data to detect fake news and threats online

For platforms or other text data sources with high velocity, natural language processing has proven to be a good first line of defense for flagging hate speech, threatening speech, or false claims. The ability to monitor social networks and other locations at scale allows for the identification of networks of “bad actors” and a systemic protection from malicious actors online.

We’ve partnered with multiple organizations to help combat fake news with our natural language processing API, site crawlers, and Knowledge Graph data. Whether as a source for live structured web data or as training data for future threat detection tools, the web is the largest source of written harmful or threatening communications. This makes it the best location for training effective natural language processing tools used by non-profits, governmental bodies, media sites looking to police their own content, and other uses.

Fraud Detection

Natural language processing plays multiple roles in fraud prevention efforts. The ability to structure product pages is utilized by large ecommerce sites to seek out duplicate and fraudulent product offerings. Secondly, structured data on organizations and key members of these organizations can help to detect patterns in illicit activity.

Knowledge graphs — one possible output of natural language processing — are particularly well suited for fraud detection because of their ability to link distinct data types. Just as human research-enabled fraud investigations “piece together” information from varying sources and on various entities, Knowledge Graphs allow for machine accumulation of similar information.

Native Advertising

For advertising embedded in other content, tracking what context provides the best setting for ad placement allows for systems to generate better and better ad placement. Using web scraping paired with natural language processing, information like the sentiment of articles, mentions of key entities as well as which entities are most central to the text can lead to better ad placement.

Many brands suffer from underperforming advertising spending as well as brand safety (placement in suitable locations), problems that natural language processing helps to aid at scale.

No News Is Good News – Monitoring Average Sentiment By News Network With Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph

Ever have the feeling that news used to be more objective? That news organizations — now media empires — have moved into the realm of entertainment? Or that a cluster of news “across the aisle” from your beliefs is completely outrageous?

Many have these feelings, and coverage is rampant on bias and even straight up “fake” facts in news reporting.

With this in mind, we wanted to see if these hunches are valid. Has news gotten more negative over time? Is it a portion of the political spectrum driving this change? Or is it simply that bad things happen in the world and later get reported on?

To jump into this inquiry we utilized Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph. Diffbot is one of the few North American organizations to crawl the entire web. We apply AI-enabled web scrapers to pages that are publicly available to extract entities — think people, places, or things — and facts — think job titles, topics, and funding rounds.

We started our inquiry with some external coverage on bias in journalism provided by AllSides Media Bias Ratings.

Continue reading

Generating B2B Sales Leads With Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph

Generation of leads is the single largest challenge for up to 85% of B2B marketers.

Simultaneously, marketing and sales dashboards are filled with ever more data. There are more ways to get in front of a potential lead than ever before. And nearly every org of interest has a digital footprint.

So what’s the deal? 🤔

Firmographic, demographic, technographic (components of quality market segmentation) data are spread across the web. And even once they’re pulled into our workflows they’re often siloed, still only semi-structured, or otherwise disconnected. Data brokers provide data that gets stale more quickly than quality curated web sources.

But the fact persists, all the lead generation data you typically need is spread across the public web.

You just needs someone (or something 🤖) to find, read, and structure this data.

Continue reading

4 Ways Technical Leaders Are Structuring Text To Drive Data Transformations [Whitepaper]

Natural and unstructured language is how humans largely communicate. For this reason, it’s often the format of organizations’ most detailed and meaningful feedback and market intelligence. 

Historically impractical to parse at scale, natural language processing has hit mainstream adoption. The global NLP market is expected to grow 20% annually through 2026.  Analysts suggest that 

As a benchmark-topping natural language processing API provider, Diffbot is in a unique position to survey cutting-edge NLP uses. In this paper, we’ll work through the state of open source, cloud-based, and custom NLP solutions in 2021, and lay out four ways in which technical leaders are structuring text to drive data transformations. 

In particular, we’ll take a look at:

  • How researchers are using the NL API to create a knowledge graph for entire country
  • How the largest native ad network in finance uses NLP to monitor topics of discussion and serve up relavent ads
  • The use of custom properties for fraud detection in natural language documents at scale
  • How the ability to train recognition of 1M custom named entities in roughly a day helps create better data

Continue reading

The 25 Most Covid-Safe Restaurants in San Francisco (According to NLP)

A few weeks ago, we ran reviews for a Michelin-reviewed restaurant through our Natural Language API. It was able to tell us what people liked or disliked about the restaurant, and even rank dishes by sentiment. In our analysis, we also noticed something curious. When our NL API pulled out the entity “Covid-19,” it wasn’t always paired with a negative sentiment.

When we mined back in to where these positive mentions of Covid-19 occurred in the reviews, we saw that our NL API appeared to be picking up on language in which restaurant reviewers felt a restaurant had handled Covid-19 well. In other words, when Covid-19 was determined to be part of a positive statement, it was because guests felt relatively safe. Or that the restaurant had come up with novel solutions for dealing with Covid-19.

With this in mind, we set to starting up another, larger analysis.

Continue reading

What We Found Analyzing 300 Yelp Reviews of a Michelin Reviewed Restaurant with Natural Language Processing

Reviews are a veritable gold mine of data. They’re one of the few times when unsolicited customers lay out the best and the worst parts of using a product or service. And the relative richness of natural language can quickly point product or service providers in a nuanced direction more definitively than quantitative metrics like time on site, bounce rate, or sales numbers.

The flip side of this linguistic richness is that reviews are largely unstructured data. Beyond that, many reviews are written somewhat informally, making the task of decoding their meaning at scale even harder.

Restaurant reviews are known as being some of the richest of all reviews. They tend to document the entire experience: social interactions, location, décor, service, price, and food.

Continue reading

Robotic Process Automation Extraction Is A Time Saver. But it’s Not Built For the Future

Enough individuals have heard the siren song of Robotic Process Automation to build several $1B companies. Even if you don’t know the “household names” in the space, something about the buzzword abbreviated as “RPA” leaves the impression that you need it. That it boosts productivity. That it enables “smart” processes. 

RPA saves millions of work hours, for sure. But how solid is the foundation for processes built using RPA tech? 

Related Reads: 

 

First off, RPA operates by literally moving pixels across the screen. Repetitive tasks are automated by saving “steps” with which someone would manipulate applications with their mouse, and then enacting these steps without human oversight. There are plenty of examples for situations in which this is handy. You need to move entries from a spreadsheet to a CRM. You need to move entries from a CRM to a CDP. You need to cut and paste thousands or millions of times between two windows in a browser. 

These are legitimate issues within back end business workflows. And RPA remedies these issues. But what happens when your software is updated? Or you need to connect two new programs? Or your ecosystem of tools changes completely? Or you just want to use your data differently? 

This shows the hint of the first issue with the foundation on which RPA is built. RPA can’t operate in environments in which it hasn’t seen (and received extensive documentation about). 

Continue reading

Is RPA Tech Becoming Outdated? Process Bots vs Search Bots in 2020

The original robots who caught my attention had physical human characteristics, or at least a physically visible presence in three dimensions: C3PO and R2D2 form the perfect duo, one modeled to walk and talk like a bookish human, the other with metallic, baby-like cuteness and it’s own language. 

Both were imagined, but still very tangible. And this imagery held staying power. This is how most of us still think about robots today. Follow the definition of robot and the following phrase surface, “a machine which resembles a human.” A phrase only followed by a description of the types of actions they actually undertake. 

Most robots today aren’t in the places we’d think to look based on sci-fi stories or dictionary definitions. Most robots come in two types: they’re sidekicks for desktop and server activities at work, or robots that scour the internet to tag and index web content.

All-in-all robots are typically still digital. Put another way, digital robots have come of age much faster than their mechanical cousins. 

Continue reading

KnowledgeNet: A Benchmark for Knowledge Base Population

EMNLP 2019 paper, datasetleaderboard and code

Knowledge bases (also known as knowledge graphs or ontologies) are valuable resources for developing intelligence applications, including search, question answering, and recommendation systems. However, high-quality knowledge bases still mostly rely on structured data curated by humans. Such reliance on human curation is a major obstacle to the creation of comprehensive, always-up-to-date knowledge bases such as the Diffbot Knowledge Graph.

The problem of automatically augmenting a knowledge base with facts expressed in natural language is known as Knowledge Base Population (KBP). This problem has been extensively studied in the last couple of decades; however, progress has been slow in part because of the lack of benchmark datasets. 

 

Knowledge Base Population (KBP) is the problem of automatically augmenting a knowledge base with facts expressed in natural language.

 

KnowledgeNet is a benchmark dataset for populating Wikidata with facts expressed in natural language on the web. Facts are of the form (subject; property; object), where subject and object are linked to Wikidata. For instance, the dataset contains text expressing the fact (Gennaro Basile; RESIDENCE; Moravia), in the passage:

“Gennaro Basile was an Italian painter, born in Naples but active in the German-speaking countries. He settled at Brunn, in Moravia, and lived about 1756…”

KBP has been mainly evaluated via annual contests promoted by TAC. TAC evaluations are performed manually and are hard to reproduce for new systems. Unlike TAC, KnowledgeNet employs an automated and reproducible way to evaluate KBP systems at any time, rather than once a year. We hope a faster evaluation cycle will accelerate the rate of improvement for KBP.

Please refer to our EMNLP 2019 Paper for details on KnowlegeNet, but here are some takeaways:

  • State-of-the-art models (using BERT) are far from achieving human performance (0.504 vs 0.822).
  • The traditional pipeline approach for this problem is severely limited by error propagation.
  • KnowledgeNet enables the development of end-to-end systems, which are a promising solution for addressing error propagation.