Scott Affens


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2024

pdf bib
Automating the Generation of a Functional Semantic Types Ontology with Foundational Models
Sachin Konan | Larry Rudolph | Scott Affens
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track)

The rise of data science, the inherent dirtiness of data, and the proliferation of vast data providers have increased the value proposition of Semantic Types. Semantic Types are a way of encoding contextual information onto a data schema that informs the user about the definitional meaning of data, its broader context, and relationships to other types. We increasingly see a world where providing structure to this information, attached directly to data, will enable both people and systems to better understand the content of a dataset and the ability to efficiently automate data tasks such as validation, mapping/joins, and eventually machine learning. While ontological systems exist, they have not had widespread adoption due to challenges in mapping to operational datasets and lack of specificity of entity-types. Additionally, the validation checks associated with data are stored in code bases separate from the datasets that are distributed. In this paper, we address both challenges holistically by proposing a system that efficiently maps and encodes functional meaning on Semantic Types.