Question answering (QA) systems on the Web try to provide crisp answers to information needs posed in natural language, replacing the traditional ranked list of documents. QA, posing a multitude of research challenges, has emerged as one of the most actively investigated topics in information retrieval, natural language processing, and the artificial intelligence communities today. The flip side of such diverse and active interest is that publications are highly fragmented across several venues in the above communities, making it very difficult for new entrants to the field to get a good overview of the topic. Through this book, we make an attempt towards mitigating the above problem by providing an overview of the state-of-the-art in question answering. We cover the twin paradigms of curated Web sources used in QA tasks ‒ trusted text collections like Wikipedia, and objective information distilled into large-scale knowledge bases. We discuss distinct methodologies that have been applied to solve the QA problem in both these paradigms, using instantiations of recent systems for illustration. We begin with an overview of the problem setup and evaluation, cover notable sub-topics like open-domain, multi-hop, and conversational QA in depth, and conclude with key insights and emerging topics. We believe that this resource is a valuable contribution towards a unified view on QA, helping graduate students and researchers planning to work on this topic in the near future.

This book is intended for anyone interested in learning more about how search works and how it is evaluated. We all use search—it's a familiar utility. Yet, few of us stop and think about how search works, what makes search results good, and who, if anyone, decides what good looks like. Search has a long and glorious history, yet it continues to evolve, and with it, the measurement and our understanding of the kinds of experiences search can deliver continues to evolve, as well. We will discuss the basics of how search engines work, how humans use search engines, and how measurement works. Equipped with these general topics, we will then dive into the established ways of measuring search user experience, and their pros and cons. We will talk about collecting labels from human judges, analyzing usage logs, surveying end users, and even touch upon automated evaluation methods. After introducing different ways of collecting metrics, we will cover experimentation as it applies to search evaluation. The book will cover evaluating different aspects of search—from search user interface (UI), to results presentation, to the quality of search algorithms. In covering these topics, we will touch upon many issues in evaluation that became sources of controversy—from user privacy, to ethical considerations, to transparency, to potential for bias. We will conclude by contrasting measuring with understanding, and pondering the future of search evaluation.

This two-volume set LNCS 11578 and 11579 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media, SCSM 2019, held in July 2019 as part of HCI International 2019 in Orlando, FL, USA. HCII 2019 received a total of 5029 submissions, of which 1275 papers and 209 posters were accepted for publication after a careful reviewing process. The 81 papers presented in these two volumes are organized in topical sections named: Social Media Design and Development, Human Behaviour in Social Media, Social Network Analysis, Community Engagement and Social Participation, Computer Mediated Communication, Healthcare Communities, Social Media in Education, Digital Marketing and Consumer Experience.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR 2010). IJCAR 2010 was held during July 16-19 as part of the 2010 Federated Logic Conference, hosted by the School of Informatics at the University ofEdinburgh,Scotland. Support by the conference sponsors – EPSRC, NSF, Microsoft Research, Association for Symbolic Logic, CADE Inc. , Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel – is gratefully acknowledged. IJCARisthepremierinternationaljointconferenceonalltopicsinautomated reasoning, including foundations, implementations, and applications. Previous IJCAR conferences were held at Siena (Italy) in 2001, Cork (Ireland) in 2004, Seattle (USA) in 2006, and Sydney (Australia) in 2008. IJCAR comprises s- eral leading conferences and workshops. In 2010, IJCAR was the fusion of the following events: –CADE: International Conference on Automated Deduction –FroCoS: International Symposium on Frontiers of Combining Systems –FTP: International Workshop on First-Order Theorem Proving – TABLEAUX: InternationalConferenceonAutomatedReasoningwith- alytic Tableaux and Related Methods There were 89 submissions (63 regular papers and 26 system descriptions) of which 40 were accepted (28 regular papers and 12 system descriptions). Each submission was assigned to at least three Program Committee members, who carefully reviewed the papers, with the help of 92 external referees. Afterwards, the submissions were discussed by the ProgramCommittee during two weeks by means of Andrei Voronkov’s EasyChair system. We want to thank Andrei very much for providing his system, which was very helpful for the management of the submissions and reviews and for the discussion of the Program Committee.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2016, held in Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, in September 2016.The 10 full papers and 3 technical communications presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 submissions. Extensions and adaptations of classical rule-based languages have found their application in a range of areas, such as ontologies for the semantic web; querying web data; semantic data management; common-sense reasoning on the web

Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet there is growing concern with how algorithms, which run just beneath the surface of our interactions online, are affecting society. This timely new edition of Search Engine Society enlightens readers on the forms of bias that algorithms introduce into our knowledge and social spaces, drawing on recent changes to technology, industries, policies, and research. It provides an introduction to the social place of the search engine and addresses crucial questions such as: How have search engines changed the way we organize our thoughts about the world, and how we work? To what extent do politics shape search, and does search shape politics? This book is a must-read for those who wish to understand the future of the social internet and how search shapes it.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2021, which took place in October 2021. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. The papers included in this volume deal with the latest advances in fundamental research, innovative technology, and applications of the Semantic Web, linked data, knowledge graphs, and knowledge processing on the Web. Papers are organized in a research track, resources and in-use track. The research track details theoretical, analytical and empirical aspects of the Semantic Web and its intersection with other disciplines. The resources track promotes the sharing of resources which support, enable or utilize semantic web research, including datasets, ontologies, software, and benchmarks. And finally, the in-use-track is dedicated to novel and significant research contributions addressing theoretical, analytical and empirical aspects of the Semantic Web and its intersection with other disciplines.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th Iberoamerican Conference and third Indo-American Conference on Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web, KGSWC 2022, which took place in Madrid, Spain, in November 2022. The 22 full and 3 short research papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers cover topics related to software and its engineering, software creation and management, Emerging technologies, Analysis and design of emerging devices and systems, Emerging tools and methodologies and others.

The two-volume set of LNCS 11778 and 11779 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2019, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in October 2019. The ISWC conference is the premier international forum for the Semantic Web / Linked Data Community. The total of 74 full papers included in this volume was selected from 283 submissions. The conference is organized in three tracks: for the Research Track 42 full papers were selected from 194 submissions; the Resource Track contains 21 full papers, selected from 64 submissions; and the In-Use Track features 11 full papers which were selected from 25 submissions to this track. The chapter "The SEPSES knowledge graph: An integrated resource for cybersecurity" is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

A major limitation of conventional web sites is their unorganized and isolated contents, which is created mainly for human consumption. This limitation can be addressed by organizing and publishing data, using powerful formats that add structure and meaning to the content of web pages and link related data to one another. Computers can "understand" such data better, which can be useful for task automation. The web sites that provide semantics (meaning) to software agents form the Semantic Web, the Artificial Intelligence extension of the World Wide Web. In contrast to the conventional Web (the "Web of Documents"), the Semantic Web includes the "Web of Data", which connects "things" (representing real-world humans and objects) rather than documents meaningless to computers. Mastering Structured Data on the Semantic Web explains the practical aspects and the theory behind the Semantic Web and how structured data, such as HTML5 Microdata and JSON-LD, can be used to improve your site’s performance on next-generation Search Engine Result Pages and be displayed on Google Knowledge Panels. You will learn how to represent arbitrary fields of human knowledge in a machine-interpretable form using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the cornerstone of the Semantic Web. You will see how to store and manipulate RDF data in purpose-built graph databases such as triplestores and quadstores, that are exploited in Internet marketing, social media, and data mining, in the form of Big Data applications such as the Google Knowledge Graph, Wikidata, or Facebook’s Social Graph. With the constantly increasing user expectations in web services and applications, Semantic Web standards gain more popularity. This book will familiarize you with the leading controlled vocabularies and ontologies and explain how to represent your own concepts. After learning the principles of Linked Data, the five-star deployment scheme, and the Open Data concept, you will be able to create and interlink five-star Linked Open Data, and merge your RDF graphs to the LOD Cloud. The book also covers the most important tools for generating, storing, extracting, and visualizing RDF data, including, but not limited to, Protégé, TopBraid Composer, Sindice, Apache Marmotta, Callimachus, and Tabulator. You will learn to implement Apache Jena and Sesame in popular IDEs such as Eclipse and NetBeans, and use these APIs for rapid Semantic Web application development. Mastering Structured Data on the Semantic Web demonstrates how to represent and connect structured data to reach a wider audience, encourage data reuse, and provide content that can be automatically processed with full certainty. As a result, your web contents will be integral parts of the next revolution of the Web.