Talk by Adrien Couque, CTO at FABERNOVEL TECHNOLOGIES

1. A roadmap to
psychohistory
or the insufficiency of current knowledge bases
Paris, January 31, 2018

2. 2//
What is psychohistory?
Foundation is a science fiction book series written by
American author Isaac Asimov.
It won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series"
in 1966.
Psychohistory is a fictional science which combines history,
sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general
predictions about the future behavior of very large groups
of people.

3. 3//
It’s a machine learning problem
Historical Data Training Prediction
New Data Re-Training

4. 4//
It’s a machine learning problem
Corpus Algorithm Objective

5. 5//
It’s a machine learning problem
Corpus Algorithm Objective
Can we find a corpus ?

6. 6//
Problem of content vs form

7. 7//
Problem of content vs form

8. 8//
Analyzing current
knowledge bases

9. 9//
Missing data
What we want in a knowledge base

10. 10//
Missing data
What we want in a knowledge base
Accuracy

11. 11//
Missing data
What we want in a knowledge base
Accuracy Relevance

12. 12//
Missing data
What we want in a knowledge base
Accuracy Relevance
Standard format

13. 13//
Missing data
What we want in a knowledge base
Accuracy Relevance
Standard format
Readable by human
and computer

14. 14//
Looking at Google Knowledge Graph: Taylor Swift
American singer-songwriter

15. 15//
Looking at Google Knowledge Graph: Abraham Lincoln
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln

16. 16//
Looking at Google Knowledge Graph: not that accurate...

17. 17//
Wolfram Alpha

18. 18//
Wolfram Alpha

19. 19//
Wikipedia
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American statesman and lawyer who
served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April
1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and perhaps its
greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis.[2][3] In doing so, he preserved the Union,
paved the way for the abolition of slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized
the economy.
An astute politician deeply involved with power issues in each state, Lincoln reached out to the
War Democrats and managed his own re-election campaign in the 1864 presidential election.
Anticipating the war's conclusion, Lincoln pushed a moderate view of Reconstruction, seeking to
reunite the nation speedily through a policy of generous reconciliation in the face of lingering
and bitter divisiveness. On April 14, 1865, five days after the surrender of Confederate general
Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was shot by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth and died the next
day. Lincoln has been consistently ranked both by scholars[5] and the public[6] as among the
greatest U.S. presidents.

20. 20//
WikiData as a Rosetta Stone

21. 21//
Wikipedia: Most important articles

22. 22//
DBpedia
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Otter_Tail_County,_Minnesota>
<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#comment> "Otter
Tail County is a county located in the U.S. state of Minnesota. As of the 2010 census, the
population was 57,303. Its county seat is Fergus Falls. The county was formed in 1858 and
organized in 1868. Otter Tail County comprises the Fergus Falls, MN Micropolitan Statistical
Area."@en .
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Murray_County,_Minnesota>
<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#comment> "Murray
County is a county located in the U.S. state of Minnesota. The population was 8,725 at the 2010
census. Its county seat is Slayton. The county was formed in 1857 and organized in 1872."@en .

23. 23//
WikiData
{
"type": "item",
"id": "Q91",
"P734": [
{
"mainsnak": {
"snaktype": "value",
"property": "P734",
"hash": "228ea0386cc21946b31af3295de9965622a8d256",
"datavalue": {
"value": {
"entity-type": "item",
"numeric-id": 18610168,
"id": "Q18610168"
},

24. 24//
WikiData
{
"family name" : "Lincoln",
"given name" : "Abraham",
"manner of death" : "homicide",
"cause of death" : "ballistic trauma",
"place of birth" : "LaRue County",
"place of death" : "Washington, D.C.",
"mother" : "Nancy Hanks Lincoln",
"father" : "Thomas Lincoln",
"child" : "Tad Lincoln",
"place of burial" : "Springfield",
"position held" : "member of the Illinois House of Representatives",
"date of death" : "15 April 1865",
"date of birth" : "12 February 1809",
"member of political party" : "Whig Party",

25. 25//
Accuracy
Missing data
Relevance
Standard format
Human/Machine readable
Comparison chart

26. 26//
Tips for building your
own knowledge base

27. 27//
Tip n°1: rely on existing standards for your ontologies

28. 28//
Tip n°2: Careful about standards: ISO 8601 dates
2018-01-31T10:00:00Z Jan 31st, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC
2016-12-31T23:59:60Z Leap second
2018-01 January 2018
20 21st century
2018-01-31T10:00:00+14 Time zones are between -12 and +14
1969-07-20T20:18:00Z Ambiguous, because before 1970
10000-01-01 Not defined
-0044-03-15 Not defined
UK: Day after 1751-03-24 1752-03-25
Russia: 1918-01-31 1918-01-13

29. 29//
Tip n°3: avoid knowledge graphs

30. 30//
Tip n°4: Working from natural language using translation
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865)
was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the
16th President of the United States from March 1861 until
his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United
States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and perhaps
its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. In
doing so, he preserved the Union, paved the way for the
abolition of slavery, strengthened the federal government,
and modernized the economy.
{
"name": "Abraham Lincoln",
"birthDate": "February 12, 1809",
"deathDate": "April 15, 1865",
"occupations": [
{
"roleName": "American statesman"
},
{
"roleName": "lawyer"
},
{
"roleName": "president of the United States",
"startDate": "March 1861",
"endDate": "April 1865"
}
],
"causeOfDeath": "assassination"
}

31. 31//
Tip n°5: Working from natural language with reading comprehension

32. 32//
Working from natural language : reading comprehension
REASONING DESCRIPTION EXAMPLE
Lexical variation
(synonymy)
Major correspondences between
the question and the answer
sentence are synonyms.
Q: What is the Rankine cycle sometimes called?
Sentence: The Rankine cycle is sometimes referred to as a practical
Carnot cycle.
Lexical variation
(world knowledge)
Major correspondences between
the question and the answer
sentence require world knowledge
to resolve.
Q: Which governing bodies have veto power?
S: The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union
have powers of amendment and veto during the legislative process.
Syntactic variation After the question is paraphrased
into declarative form, its syntactic
dependency structure does not
match that of the answer sentence
even after local modifications.
Q: What Shakespeare scholar is currently on the faculty?
S: Current faculty include the antimopologist Marshall Sahlins, ...,
Shakespeare scholar David Bevington.
Multiple sentence There is anaphora, or higher-level
reasoning fusion of multiple
sentences is required.
Q: What collection does the V&A Theatre & Performance galleries hold?
S: The V&A Theatre &Performance galleries opened in March 2009. They
hold the UK’s biggest national collection of material about live
performance.

33. Merci.
34//
Adrien COUQUE
CTO
adrien.couque@applidium.com