OntologySummit2024/Synthesis

Draft Summit Synthesis

Overview

• LLM challenges align well with Ontology capabilities
  • Combining the strengths of LLMs and ontologies/knowledge graphs to overcome weaknesses of each
• The Fall Series
  • Discussed “hybrid systems”, provided motivation for developing them, and demonstrated applications/sandboxes based on them
  • Highlighted need to keep exploring areas of collaboration, and improving both ontology and LLM development and use
  • Various architectures/frameworks show different interactions between ontologies and LLMs
  • Several with explicit feedback loops

Broader Thoughts

Deborah McGuinness

The Evolving Landscape: Generative AI, Ontologies, and Knowledge Graphs

• AI is changing business landscape
  • Necessary to understand strengths and weaknesses of LLMs
  • “AI will not replace most knowledge professionals but many knowledge professionals who do not collaborate with generative AI will be replaced”
  • “Generative AI explosion provides … a unique opportunity to shine and a time to rethink our methods”
• LLMs are “usefully wrong” – providing information to help you think

Gary Marcus

No AGI (and no Trustworthy AI) without Neurosymbolic AI

• Hypothesis: Scale is all you need
  • Has been funded more than any other hypothesis in AI history and made progress
  • But has failed to solve very many problems: AGI, autonomous driving, common sense, bias issues, reliability, trustworthiness, ...
  • Tech leaders are starting to back away from this hypothesis
  • Hubert Dreyfus: Climbing ever larger trees will not get one to the moon (early 1970s)
  • [Deep learning is] a better ladder, but a better ladder doesn't necessarily get you to the moon
• We still desperately need neurosymbolic AI but it won't be enough to get to AGI
  • Intelligence is multi-faceted: we should not expect one-size-fits-all solutions
  • Looking for a quick win is distracting us from the hard work that we actually need to do

Anatoly Levenchuk

Hybrid Reasoning, the Scope of Knowledge, and What Is Beyond Ontologies?

• A cognitive system/agent is a cognitive architecture with a collection of KGs, LLMs and other knowledge representations
  • Cognitive architecture refers to both a theory about the structure of the human mind and to a computational instantiation of such a theory used in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational cognitive science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture)
• Where KGs are discriminative declarations of “what is in the world” and LLMs are generative
• Both have roles in knowledge evolution
• “Looking at LLMs as chatbots is the same as looking at early computers as calculators. We're seeing an emergence of a whole new computing paradigm, and it is very early.”

John Sowa and Arun Majumdar

Trustworthy Computation: Diagrammatic Reasoning With and About LLMs

• Large language models cannot do reasoning, but find and apply reasoning patterns from training data
• Important to note that “thinking in language” is only one form of reasoning
• Systems developed by Permion use LLMs for summarization/synthesis
  • But restrict responses based on the ontology
• Combine LLMs with a “scaffolding model” (vector, matrix and tensor-based) => ontology and methods of diagrammatic reasoning based on conceptual graphs (CGs)
  • Where ontology is derived/tailored to policies, rules, and specifications of the project or business

Fabian Neuhaus

Ontologies in the era of large language models – a perspective

• Argument 1: Attempts to automate ontology development are based on a misunderstanding of what ontology engineers do
  • Ontology engineers create consensus
• Argument 2: There is no ontology hidden in the weights of the LLM
  • Very good at navigating ambiguities and different perspectives
  • But does not resolve ambiguities, have logical consistency or persistent ontological commitments

John Sowa

Without Ontology, LLMs are clueless

• LLMs are a powerful technology, remarkably similar to a joke in 1900.
  • Dump books in a machine, turn a crank, and expect a stream of knowledge to flow through the wires.
• The results are sometimes good and sometimes disastrous.
  • LLM methods are excellent for translation, useful for search, but unreliable for generating new combinations.
  • A lawyer used them to find precedents for a legal case.
  • It generated an imaginary precedent and created a citation that seemed to be legitimate.
  • But the opposing lawyer found that the citation was false.
• Ontology states criteria for testing the results of LLMs.
  • Anything generated by LLMs is just a guess (hypothesis).
  • If it's inconsistent with the ontology or with a verified database, it can be rejected as false.

A look across the industry

Kurt Cagle

Complementary Thinking: Language Models, Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs

• Mapping LLMs to ontologies/KGs
  • Matching LLM concepts to KG instances over specific classes such as schema.org or NIEM
  • Using a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generator) plug-in to communicate with an ontology/KG and add to the node-sets or control output transformation
  • Reading Turtle, RDF-XML and JSON-LD
• Mapping ontologies/KGs to LLMs
  • Using URI/IRI references in data and obtaining results with those references
  • Adding KG embeddings (vector space representations) to LLM training corpus

Tony Seale

How Ontologies Can Unlock the Potential of Large Language Models for Business

• LLM and ontology “reinforcing feedback loop of continuous improvement”
  • Using ontology/KG to place “guardrails” on LLM outputs
  • Using LLMs to aid in maintenance and extension of ontology
• Information as a continuous stream (~LLMs) or discrete chunks (~KGs)
  • Analogy to System 1 (intuitive/instinctual) and System 2 (reasoning based) thinking

Yuan He

DeepOnto: A Python Package for Ontology Engineering with Deep Learning and Language Models

• DeepOnto
• Python package for ontology engineering with deep learning and LMs

Hamed Babaei Giglou

LLMs4OL: Large Language Models for Ontology Learning

• Results:
  • We explored LLMs potential for OL through our introduced conceptual framework, LLMs4OL.
  • Extensive experiments on 11 LLMs across three OL tasks demonstrate the paradigm’s proof of concept.
  • The obtained empirical results show that foundational LLMs are not sufficiently suitable for ontology construction that entails a high degree of reasoning skills and domain expertise.
  • When LLMs effectively fine-tuned they just might work as suitable assistants, alleviating the knowledge acquisition bottleneck, for ontology construction.
  • A codebase with detailed results is shared: https://github.com/HamedBabaei/LLMs4OL
• Future:
  • Still, we need to explore more recent LLMs.
  • Incorporate more ontologies in this study.
  • Build a benchmark dataset that considers more domains.
  • Optimize three LLMs4OL tasks.

Demos of hybrid systems

Evren Sirin

Stardog Voicebox: LLM-Powered Question Answering with Knowledge Graphs

• Stardog Voicebox combines LLM and graph database technology to:
  • Take a description of ontology and create it
• Turn natural language query into SPARQL
  • Provide context for decisions and debug/repair queries
• Built on:
  • Open-source foundational model, MPT-30B
  • Fine-tuned with ~20K SPARQL queries
  • Vector embedding and search via MiniLM-L6-v2 language model

Prasad Yalamanchik

Harvest Knowledge From Language - Harness the power of Large Language Models and Semantic Technology

• TextDistil
  • Inputs – text documents; Outputs – NQuad files and JSON
  • Models trained on domain-specific variables, and training data labeled using taxonomy
  • Ontology for organization/semantics (human defined)
  • Query in NL parsed to ontology concepts and used to generate query to KG
  • Triples returned with provenance from ingested documents
  • LLM used to summarize response

Andrea Westerinen

Populating Knowledge Graphs: The Confluence of Ontology and Large Language Models

• Overview of open-source tooling to parse news articles (Deep Narrative Analysis, DNA)
  • Create knowledge stores with data from text stored in RDF graphs
  • Enabling aggregation of textual information within and across documents
  • To efficiently compare and analyze collections of text to understand patterns, trends, …
• Prompts sent to OpenAI chat completion API for:
  • Narrative analysis
  • Rhetorical devices and viewpoint interpretations
  • Sentence analysis
  • Linguistics (tense, voice, errors, …), rhetorical devices and mapping to ontology
• LLM JSON responses (already mapped to the ontology) used to generate RDF
  • Which is stored in graph database

Deborah McGuinness

• Applications of LLMs at RPI
  • Collaborative KG generation by leveraging LLMs for refinement and population (value restrictions and instances) of an existing ontology, in partnership with human
    • Enhancing wine and cheese ontology
    • But could also provide concepts that are a starting point for a new ontology, for human consideration
  • LLM/KG Fact Checker (ChatBS) “sandbox” with questions submitted (multiple times) to OpenAI completion API and entity linking to Wikidata for validation

Till Mossakowski

Modular design patterns for neural-symbolic integration: refinement and combination

• Neural networks can extend ontologies of structured objects: from neuro to symbolic
• Ontology pre-training can improve transformer performance: from symbolic to neuro
• We can beat purely symbolic and purely neural baselines
• Design patterns as systematic building blocks => towards a theory of neuro-symbolic engineering
• Future work: Novel neural embeddings for ontologies

Markus J. Buehler

Accelerating Scientific Discovery with Generative Knowledge Extraction, Graph-Based Representation, and Multimodal Intelligent Graph Reasoning

• Navigating generated knowledge graphs can result in new scientific insights