Abstract
Data lakes are repositories of data with potential for analysis. Data lakes aim to liberate data from silos, thereby enabling cross-cutting analyses that were hitherto out of reach. This gives rise to significant challenges for data scientists simply discovering what data sets may be relevant to a task-in-hand. Given a data set of interest, several proposals have been made for indexing schemes that can identify related data sets. However, such schemes tend to build on similarity metrics that stop short of providing a clear explanation as to how an identified data set relates to a provided target. We address this problem by applying Natural Language Inference (NLI) to providing explanations as to how the attributes of discovered data sets relate to those of the target, in terms of a collection of semantic relations. We provide two approaches to inferring semantic relations: (a) by performing unsupervised intensional and extensional analysis of the data sources using Natural Language Processing techniques; and (b) by performing supervised learning of semantic relations by applying BERT over source schema information. The contributions of this paper are: an NLI strategy for providing explicit characterisation of semantic relations between data sets; two approaches to inferring the semantic relations; and an empirical evaluation of the approaches using open government data.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In practice, one could drastically reduce the potentially prohibitive space of attribute pairs to process by initially performing general similarity discovery (e.g., using \(D^3L\)Â [2]) and apply RNLI only on the resulted similar pairs.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
These parameters lead to the best results during validation.
- 5.
References
Bar-Haim, R., et al.: The second pascal recognising textual entailment challenge. In: Proceedings of the Second PASCAL Challenges Workshop on Recognising Textual Entailment (2006)
Bogatu, A., Fernandes, A.A., Paton, N.W., Konstantinou, N.: Dataset discovery in data lakes. In: 36th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), pp. 709–720. IEEE (2020)
Bollacker, K., Evans, C., Paritosh, P., Sturge, T., Taylor, J.: Freebase: a collaboratively created graph database for structuring human knowledge. In: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 1247–1250 (2008)
Castro Fernandez, R., Abedjan, Z., Koko, F., Yuan, G., Madden, S., Stonebraker, M.: Aurum: a data discovery system. In: 34th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2018, Paris, France, 16–19 April 2018, pp. 1001–1012 (2018)
Castro Fernandez, R., et al.: Seeping semantics: Linking datasets using word embeddings for data discovery. In: 34th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2018, Paris, France, 16–19 April 2018, pp. 989–1000 (2018)
Conover, W.J.: Practical Nonparametric Statistics. Wiley, New York (1999)
Das Sarma, A., et al.: Finding related tables. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2012, Scottsdale, AZ, USA, 20–24 May 2012, pp. 817–828 (2012)
Devlin, J., Chang, M., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In: Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT, pp. 4171–4186. ACL (2019). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n19-1423
Hai, R., Geisler, S., Quix, C.: Constance: an intelligent data lake system. In: Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD Conference 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA, 26 June– 01 July 2016, pp. 2097–2100 (2016)
Hassanzadeh, O., Trewin, S., Gliozzo, A.: Semantic concept discovery over event databases. In: Gangemi, A. (ed.) ESWC 2018. LNCS, vol. 10843, pp. 288–303. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93417-4_19
Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. In: Bengio, Y., LeCun, Y. (eds.) 3rd International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2015, San Diego, CA, USA, 7–9 May 2015, Conference Track Proceedings (2015)
Limaye, G., Sarawagi, S., Chakrabarti, S.: Annotating and searching web tables using entities, types and relationships. PVLDB. 3, 1338–1347 (2010)
MacCartney, B., Galley, M., Manning, C.: A phrase-based alignment model for natural language inference. In: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 802–811 (2008)
MacCartney, B., Manning, C.: Natural logic for textual inference. In: Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 193–200 (2007)
Manning, C.D., Surdeanu, M., Bauer, J., Finkel, J.R., Bethard, S., McClosky, D.: The stanford corenlp natural language processing toolkit. In: Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014, 22–27 June 2014, Baltimore, MD, USA, System Demonstrations, pp. 55–60 (2014)
Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado, G., Dean, J.: Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. In: NIPS (2013)
Miller, G.A.: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT press, Cambridge (1998)
Ota, M., Mueller, H., Freire, J., Srivastava, D.: Data-driven domain discovery for structured datasets. PVLDB 13(7), 953–965 (2020)
Pham, M., Alse, S., Knoblock, C.A., Szekely, P.: Semantic labeling: a domain-independent approach. In: Groth, P. (ed.) ISWC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9981, pp. 446–462. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46523-4_27
Seitner, J., et al.: A large database of hypernymy relations extracted from the web. In: Calzolari, N. (eds.) Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation LREC 2016, Portorož, Slovenia, 23–28 May 2016. European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (2016)
Terrizzano, I.G., Schwarz, P.M., Roth, M., Colino, J.E.: Data wrangling: The challenging yourney from the wild to the lake. In: CIDR 2015, Seventh Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, Asilomar, CA, USA, 4–7 January 2015, Online Proceedings. www.cidrdb.org (2015)
Vaswani, A., et al.: Attention is all you need. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2017, 4–9 December 2017, Long Beach, CA, USA, pp. 5998–6008 (2017)
Venetis, P., et al.: Recovering semantics of tables on the web. In: PVLDB, pp. 528–538 (2011)
Yakout, M., Ganjam, K., Chakrabarti, K., Chaudhuri, S.: Info gather: entity augmentation and attribute discovery by holistic matching with web tables. In: SIGMOD, pp. 97–108 (05 2012)
Acknowledgements
Mario Ramirez is supported by the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT). Alex Bogatu is supported by Innovate UK.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ramirez, M., Bogatu, A., Paton, N.W., Freitas, A. (2021). Natural Language Inference over Tables: Enabling Explainable Data Exploration on Data Lakes. In: Verborgh, R., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12731. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77385-4_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77385-4_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-77384-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-77385-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)