Robot-Assisted minimally invasive robotic surgery is the gold standard for the surgical treatment of many pathological conditions, and several manuals and academic papers describe how to perform these interventions. These high-quality, often peer-reviewed texts are the main study resource for medical personnel and consequently contain essential procedural domain-specific knowledge. The procedural knowledge therein described could be extracted, e.g., on the basis of semantic parsing models, and used to develop clinical decision support systems or even automation methods for some procedure’s steps. However, natural language understanding algorithms such as, for instance, semantic role labelers have lower efficacy and coverage issues when applied to domain others than those they are typically trained on (i.e., newswire text). To overcome this problem, starting from PropBank frames, we propose a new linguistic resource specific to the robotic-surgery domain, named Robotic Surgery Procedural Framebank (RSPF). We extract from robotic-surgical texts verbs and nouns that describe surgical actions and extend PropBank frames by adding any of new lemmas, frames or role sets required to cover missing lemmas, specific frames describing the surgical significance, or new semantic roles used in procedural surgical language. Our resource is publicly available and can be used to annotate corpora in the surgical domain to train and evaluate Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) systems in a challenging fine-grained domain setting.

When people or organizations provide information, they make choices regarding what information they include and how they present it. The combination of these two aspects (the content and stance provided by the source) represents a perspective. Investigating differences in perspective can provide various useful insights in the reliability of information, the way perspectives change over time, shared beliefs among groups of a similar social or political background and contrasts between other groups, etc. This paper introduces GRaSP, a generic framework for modeling perspectives and their sources.

This paper presents the Event and Implied Situation Ontology (ESO), a resource which formalizes the pre and post situations of events and the roles of the entities affected by an event. The ontology reuses and maps across existing resources such as WordNet, SUMO, VerbNet, PropBank and FrameNet. We describe how ESO is injected into a new version of the Predicate Matrix and illustrate how these resources are used to detect information in large document collections that otherwise would have remained implicit. The model targets interpretations of situations rather than the semantics of verbs per se. The event is interpreted as a situation using RDF taking all event components into account. Hence, the ontology and the linked resources need to be considered from the perspective of this interpretation model.

We introduce PreMOn (predicate model for ontologies), a linguistic resource for exposing predicate models (PropBank, NomBank, VerbNet, and FrameNet) and mappings between them (e.g, SemLink) as Linked Open Data. It consists of two components: (i) the PreMOn Ontology, an extension of the lemon model by the W3C Ontology-Lexica Community Group, that enables to homogeneously represent data from the various predicate models; and, (ii) the PreMOn Dataset, a collection of RDF datasets integrating various versions of the aforementioned predicate models and mapping resources. PreMOn is freely available and accessible online in different ways, including through a dedicated SPARQL endpoint.

This paper presents the Event and Implied Situation Ontology (ESO), a manually constructed resource which formalizes the pre and post situations of events and the roles of the entities affected by an event. The ontology is built on top of existing resources such as WordNet, SUMO and FrameNet. The ontology is injected to the Predicate Matrix, a resource that integrates predicate and role information from amongst others FrameNet, VerbNet, PropBank, NomBank and WordNet. We illustrate how these resources are used on large document collections to detect information that otherwise would have remained implicit. The ontology is evaluated on two aspects: recall and precision based on a manually annotated corpus and secondly, on the quality of the knowledge inferred by the situation assertions in the ontology. Evaluation results on the quality of the system show that 50% of the events typed and enriched with ESO assertions are correct.