Following New Scientist, also WebWereld features an article about my identity extraction work together with Fox IT: “Politiesoftware filtert slim identiteiten uit digibewijs” (Dutch).

The popular science magazine New Scientist features a small article on one of my “Crime Science” endeavors with Hans Henseler and Jop Hofsté from the company Fox-IT: Fast digital forensics sniff out accomplices (also appeared in Mafia Today). It is based on the MSc-project work of Jop Hofsté which will be demonstrated at ICAIL 2013.

On 7 December 2012, Paul Stapersma defended his MSc thesis “Efficient Query Evaluation on Probabilistic XML Data”. The MSc project was supervised by me, Maarten Fokkinga and Jan Flokstra. The thesis is the result of a more than 2 year cooperation between Paul and me to build a probabilistic XML database system on top of a relational one: MayBMS.
“Efficient Query Evaluation on Probabilistic XML Data”[download]
In many application scenarios, reliability and accuracy of data are of great importance. Data is often uncertain or inconsistent because the exact state of represented real world objects is unknown. A number of uncertain data models have emerged to cope with imperfect data in order to guarantee a level of reliability and accuracy. These models include probabilistic XML (P-XML) –an uncertain semi-structured data model– and U-Rel –an uncertain table-structured data model. U-Rel is used by MayBMS, an uncertain relational database management system (URDBMS) that provides scalable query evaluation. In contrast to U-Rel, there does not exist an efficient query evaluation mechanism for P-XML.
In this thesis, we approach this problem by instructing MayBMS to cope with P-XML in order to evaluate XPath queries on P-XML data as SQL queries on uncertain relational data. This approach entails two aspects: (1) a data mapping from P-XML to U-Rel that ensures that the same information is represented by database instances of both data structures, and (2) a query mapping from XPath to SQL that ensures that the same question is specified in both query languages.
We present a specification of a P-XML to U-Rel data mapping and a corresponding XPath to SQL mapping. Additionally, we present two designs of this specification. The first design constructs a data mapping in such way that the corresponding query mapping is a traditional XPath to SQL mapping. The second design differs from the first in the sense that a component of the data mapping is evaluated as part of the query evaluation process. This offers the advantage that the data mapping is more efficient. Additionally, the second design allows for a number of optimizations that affect the performance of the query evaluation process. However, this process is burdened with the extra task of evaluating the data mapping component.
An extensive experimental evaluation on synthetically generated data sets and real-world data sets shows that our implementation of the second design is more efficient in most scenarios. Not only is the P-XML data mapping executed more efficient, the query evaluation performance is also improved in most scenarios.

Fabian Panse, PhD student at the University of Hamburg, visits me for an entire week 17-21 December 2012. He will present at the DB seminar on Tuesday: “Duplicate detection in probabilistic data”.

On 21 June 2012, Jasper Kuperus defended his MSc thesis “Catching Criminals by Chance: A probabilistic Approach to Named Entity Recognition using Targeted Feedback”. The MSc project was supervised by me, Dolf Trieschnigg, Mena Badieh Habib and Cor Veenman from the Dutch Forensics Institute (NFI).
“Catching Criminals by Chance: A probabilistic Approach to Named Entity Recognition using Targeted Feedback”[download]
In forensics, large amounts of unstructured data have to be analyzed in order to find evidence or to detect risks. For example, the contents of a personal computer or USB data carriers belonging to a suspect. Automatic processing of these large amounts of unstructured data, using techniques like Information Extraction, is inevitable. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important first step in Information Extraction and still a difficult task.
A main challenge in NER is the ambiguity among the extracted named entities. Most approaches take a hard decision on which named entities belong to which class or which boundary fits an entity. However, often there is a significant amount of ambiguity when making this choice, resulting in errors by making these hard decisions. Instead of making such a choice, all possible alternatives can be preserved with a corresponding confidence of the probability that it is the correct choice. Extracting and handling entities in such a probabilistic way is called Probabilistic Named Entity Recognition (PNER).
Combining the fields of Probabilistic Databases and Information Extraction results in a new field of research. This research project explores the problem of Probabilistic NER. Although Probabilistic NER does not make hard decisions when ambiguity is involved, it also does not yet resolve ambiguity. A way of resolving this ambiguity is by using user feedback to let the probabilities converge to the real world situation, called Targeted Feedback. The main goal in this project is to improve NER results by using PNER, preventing ambiguity related extraction errors and using Targeted Feedback to reduce ambiguity.
This research project shows that Recall values of the PNER results are significantly higher than for regular NER, adding up to improvements over 29%. Using Targeted Feedback, both Precision and Recall approach 100% after full user feed- back. For Targeted Feedback, both the order in which questions are posed and whether a strategy attempts to learn from the answers of the user provide performance gains. Although PNER shows to have potential, this research project provides insufficient evidence whether PNER is better than regular NER.

A journal paper with my vision on data interoperability and a basis formalization has been accepted for a special issue of the Journal of IT volume 54, issue 3.
Managing Uncertainty: The Road Towards Better Data Interoperability.
Maurice van Keulen
Data interoperability encompasses the many data management activities needed for effective information management in anyone´s or any organization´s everyday work such as data cleaning, coupling, fusion, mapping, and information extraction. It is our conviction that a significant amount of money and time in IT that is devoted to these activities, is about dealing with one problem: “semantic uncertainty”. Sometimes data is subjective, incomplete, not current, or incorrect, sometimes it can be interpreted in different ways, etc. In our opinion, clean correct data is only a special case, hence data management technology should treat data quality problems as a fact of life, not as something to be repaired afterwards. Recent approaches treat uncertainty as an additional source of information which should be preserved to reduce its impact. We believe that the road towards better data interoperability, is to be found in teaching our data processing tools and systems about all forms of doubt and how to live with them. In this paper, we show for several data interoperability use cases (deduplication, data coupling/fusion, and information extraction) how to formally model the associated data quality problems as semantic uncertainty. Furthermore, we provide an argument why our approach leads to better data interoperability in terms of natural problem exposure and risk assessment, more robustness and automation, reduced development costs, and potential for natural and effective feedback loops leveraging human attention.
[details]

I wrote a journal paper with Fabian Panse (University of Hamburg) about handling ambiguous situations in deduplication in a probabilistic way. It has been accepted for the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality.
Indeterministic Handling of Uncertain Decisions in Deduplication.
Fabian Panse, Norbert Ritter, and Maurice van Keulen
In current research and practice, deduplication is usually considered as a deterministic approach in which tuples are either declared to be duplicates or not. In ambiguous situations, however, it is often not completely clear-cut, which tuples represent the same real-world entity. In deterministic approaches, many realistic possibilities may be ignored, which in turn can lead to false decisions. In this paper, we present an indeterministic approach for deduplication by using a probabilistic target model including techniques for proper probabilistic interpretation of similarity matching results. Thus, instead of deciding for a most likely situation, all realistic situations are modeled in the resultant data. This approach minimizes the negative impact of false decisions. Furthermore, the deduplication process becomes almost fully automatic and human effort can be reduced to a large extent. To increase applicability, we introduce several semi-indeterministic methods that heuristically reduce the set of indeterministically handled decisions in several meaningful ways. We also describe a full-indeterministic method for theoretical and presentational reasons.
[details]

I wrote a position paper about a different approach towards development of information extractors, which I call Sherlock Holmes-style based on his famous quote “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. The idea is that we fundamentally treat annotations as uncertain. We even start with a “no knowledge”, i.e., “everything is possible” starting point and then interactively add more knowledge, apply the knowledge directly to the annotation state by removing possible annotations and recalculating the probabilities of the remaining ones. For example, “Paris Hilton”, “Paris”, and “Hilton” can all be interpreted as a City, Hotel or Person name. But adding knowledge like “If a phrase is interpreted as a Person Name, then its subphrases should not be interpreted as a City” makes the annotations <"Paris Hilton":Person Name> and <"Paris":City> mutually exclusive. Observe that initially all annotations were independent, and these two are now dependent. We argue in the paper that the main challenge in this approach lies in efficient storage and conditioning of probabilistic dependencies, because trivial approaches do not work.
Handling Uncertainty in Information Extraction.
Maurice van Keulen, Mena Badieh Habib
This position paper proposes an interactive approach for developing information extractors based on the ontology definition process with knowledge about possible (in)correctness of annotations. We discuss the problem of managing and manipulating probabilistic dependencies.

The paper will be presented at the URSW workshop co-located with ICSW 2011, 23 October 2011, Bonn, Germany [details]

A master student performed a problem exploration for the PayDIBI project. This is the report he wrote.
Integration of Biological Sources – Exploring the Case of Protein Homology
Tjeerd W. Boerman, Maurice van Keulen, Paul van der Vet, Edouard I. Severing (Wageningen University)
Data integration is a key issue in the domain of bioin- formatics, which deals with huge amounts of heterogeneous biological data that grows and changes rapidly. This paper serves as an introduction in the field of bioinformatics and the biological concepts it deals with, and an exploration of the integration problems a bioinformatics scientist faces. We examine ProGMap, an integrated protein homology system used by bioinformatics scientists at Wageningen University, and several use cases related to protein homology. A key issue we identify is the huge manual effort required to unify source databases into a single resource. Uncertain databases are able to contain several possible worlds, and it has been proposed that they can be used to significantly reduce initial integration efforts. We propose several directions for future work where uncertain databases can be applied to bioinformatics, with the goal of furthering the cause of bioinformatics integration.
[details]

The MUD-workshop co-located with VLDB 2011 will be the last one. Ander de Keijzer and I decided that after having organized 5 MUD-workshops, the topic of uncertainty in data has been established well enough in the major conferences. [Proceedings]