Knowledge Graph-driven Tabular Data Discovery from Scientific Documents

Vijay S. Kumar; Varish Mulwad; Jenny Weisenberg Williams; Tim Finin; Sharad Dixit; Anupam Joshi

VLDB 2023 Workshop on Tabular Data Analysis

Knowledge Graph-driven Tabular Data Discovery from Scientific Documents

Vijay S. Kumar, Varish Mulwad, Jenny Weisenberg Williams, Tim Finin, Sharad Dixit, and Anupam Joshi

September 1, 2023

Synthesizing information from collections of tables embedded within scientific and technical documents is increasingly critical to emerging knowledge-driven applications. Given their structural heterogeneity, highly domain-specific content, and diffuse context, inferring a precise semantic understanding of such tables has traditionally been better accomplished by linking tabular content to concepts and entities in reference knowledge graphs. However, existing tabular data discovery systems are not designed to exploit these explicit, human-interpretable semantic linkages adequately. Moreover, given the prevalence of misinformation, confidence in the reliability of tabular information has become an important, often overlooked, factor in discovering open datasets. We describe a preliminary implementation of a discovery engine that enables table-based semantic search and retrieval of tabular information from a linked knowledge graph of scientific tables. We discuss the viability of semantics-guided tabular data analysis operations, including on-the-fly table generation under reliability constraints, within discovery scenarios motivated by intelligence production from documents.

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