Short
Bio: André Freitas leads the Reasoning
& Explainable AI Lab at Idiap and at the Department
of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He is
also the AI group leader at the digital Experimental Cancer
Medicine Team (CancerResearchUK). His main research
interests are on enabling the development of AI methods to
support abstract, explainable and flexible inference. In
particular, he investigates how the combination of neural and
symbolic data representation paradigms can deliver better
inference. Some of his research topics include: explanation
generation, natural language inference, explainable question
answering, knowledge graphs and open information extraction.
He is actively engaged in collaboration projects with
industrial and clinical partners.
CV | LinkedIn
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Scholar | DBLP
Vision & Research Focus: The Reasoning & Explainable AI Lab aims at developing systems which capable of complex, abstract and flexible inference. We operate at the interface between neural and symbolic AI methods aiming to enable the next generation of explainable, data-efficient and safe AI systems. Our research investigates how the combination of latent and explicit data representation paradigms can deliver better inference over data. Our current research areas include:
Interest/Research Areas:
Publications:
Vivian S. Silva, André Freitas, Siegfried
Handschuh, Recognizing and Justifying Text Entailment
through Distributional Navigation on Definition Graphs,
Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI-18), New Orleans, USA, 2018 (Full Conference Paper)
(pdf).
Matthias Cetto, Christina Niklaus, André
Freitas and Siegfried Handschuh, Graphene:
Semantically-Linked Propositions in Open Information
Extraction, In Proceedings of the 27th International
Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), New-Mexico,
USA, 2018 (Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
Christina Niklaus, Matthias Cetto, André Freitas and Siegfried
Handschuh, A Survey on Open Information Extraction, In
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on
Computational Linguistics (COLING), New-Mexico, USA, 2018 (Best
Survey Paper Award) (Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
Matthias Cetto, Christina Niklaus, André
Freitas and Siegfried Handschuh, Graphene: A
Context-Preserving Open Information Extraction System, In
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on
Computational Linguistics (COLING), New-Mexico, USA, 2018
(Demonstration Paper) (pdf).
Juliano E. Sales, André Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh, An
Open Vocabulary Semantic Parser for End-User Programming using
Natural Language, 12th IEEE International Conference on
Semantic Computing (ICSC), USA, 2018 (Best Student Paper Award)
(Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
Siamak Barzegar, Brian Davis, Siegfried
Handschuh, André Freitas, Multilingual Semantic
Relatedness using Lightweight Machine Translation, 12th
IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), USA,
2018 (Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
Siamak Barzegar, Brian Davis, Manel Zarrouk,
Siegfried Handschuh, André Freitas, SemR-11: A Multi-Lingual
Gold-Standard for Semantic Similarity and Relatedness for
Eleven Languages, 11th Language Resources and Evaluation
Conference (LREC), Japan, 2018 (Linguistic Resource Paper) (pdf).
Thomas Gaillat, Manel Zarrouk, André Freitas,
Brian Davis, The SSIX Corpora: Three Gold Standard Corpora
for Sentiment Analysis in English, Spanish and German
Financial Microblogs, 11th Language Resources and
Evaluation Conference (LREC), Japan, 2018 (Linguistic Resource
Paper) (pdf).
Juliano Efson Sales, Leonardo Souza, Siamak
Barzegar, Brian Davis, André Freitas and Siegfried Handschuh, Indra:
A Word Embedding and Semantic Relatedness Server, 11th
Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC),
Japan, 2018 (Linguistic Resource Paper) (pdf).
Vivian S. Silva, André Freitas, Siegfried
Handschuh, Building a Knowledge Graph from Natural Language
Definitions for Interpretable Text Entailment Recognition,
11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Japan,
2018 (Linguistic Resource Paper) (pdf).
Juliano E. Sales, Siamak Barzegar, Wellington
Franco, Bernhard Bermeitinger, Tiago Cunha, Brian Davis, André
Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh, A Multilingual Test Collection
for the Semantic Search of Entity Categories, 11th
Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Japan, 2018
(Linguistic Resource Paper) (pdf).
Macedo Maia, André Freitas, Alexandra Balahur,
Siegfried Handschuh, Manel Zarrouk, Ross McDermott, Brian Davis,
WWW’18 Open Challenge: Financial Opinion Mining and Question
Answering, In Proceedings of The Web Conference, Lyon,
France, 2018 (Challenge Description) (pdf).
Juliano Efson Sales, Siegfried Handschuh, André
Freitas, End-user Software Development Using Natural
Language: Task Description, Semeval 2017 (Task
Description) (pdf).
Keith Cortis, Tobias Dauert, André Freitas,
Manuela Huerliman, Manel Zarrouk, Siegfried Handschuh, Brain
Davis, Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis on Financial
Microblogs and News: Task Description, Semeval 2017 (Task
Description) (pdf).
Bernhard Bermeitinger, Simon Donig, André
Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh, Object Classification in
Images of Neoclassical Artifacts Using Deep Learning,
Digital Humanities, 2017 (Conference Paper) (pdf).
Siamak Barzegar, André Freitas, Siegfried
Handschuh, Brian Davis, Composite Semantic Relation
Classification, 20th International Conference on
Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB,
2017 (Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
André Freitas, Siamak Barzegar, Juliano E.
Sales, Siegfried Handschuh and Brian Davis, Semantic
Relatedness for All (Languages): A Comparative Analysis of
Multilingual Semantic Relatedness using Machine Translation,
20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and
Knowledge Management (EKAW), 2016. (Full Conference Paper)
(pdf).
Vivian S. Silva, André Freitas and Siegfried
Handschuh, Supersense Word Tagging with Foundational
Ontology Classes, 20th International Conference on Knowledge
Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW), 2016. (Full
Conference Paper) (pdf).
Eduardo H. Kamioka, André Freitas, Frederico Caroli, and Siegfried Handschuh, Determining Data Relevance using Semantic Types and Graphical Interpretation Cues, 15th International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA), Stockholm, 2016. (Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
Christina Niklaus, Bernhard Bermeitinger,
Siegfried Handschuh, André Freitas, A Sentence Simplification
System for Improving Relation Extraction, 26th
International Conference on Computational Linguistics, (COLING),
Osaka, 2016. (Demonstration in Proceedings) (pdf).
Vivian S. Silva, Siegfried Handschuh and André Freitas, Categorization
of Semantic Roles for Dictionary Definitions, Cognitive
Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-V), Workshop at the 26th
International Conference on Computational Linguistics, (COLING),
Osaka, 2016. (Full Workshop Paper) (pdf).
Vivian S. Silva, Manuela Hürliman, Brian Davis, Siegfried Handschuh and André Freitas, Semantic Relation Classification: Task Formalisation and Refinement, Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-V), Workshop at the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, (COLING), Osaka, 2016. (Full Workshop Paper) (pdf).
Frederico Tommasi Caroli, João Carlos Pereira Da Silva, André Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh, NNBlocks: A Deep Learning Framework for Computational Linguistics Neural Network Models, In Proceedings of the 10th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Portoroz, 2016 (Extended Abstract in Proceedings) (pdf).
Muntazir Mehdi, Yasar Khan, Andre Freitas, Joao
Bosco Jares, Saleem Raza, Panagiotis Hasapis, Ratnesh Sahay, A
Linked Data Visualiser for Finite Element Biosimulations,
10th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC),
California, USA, 2016 (Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
Muntazir Mehdi, Yasar Khan, André Freitas, Joao
Bosco Jares, Saleem Raza, Panagiotis Hasapis, Ratnesh
Sahay, Demonstrating A Linked Data Visualiser for
Finite Element Biosimulations, 10th IEEE International
Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), California, USA, 2016.
(Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf).
Bernhard Bermeitinger, André Freitas, Simon
Donig, and Siegfried Handschuh, Object Classification in
Images of Neoclassical Furniture using Deep Learning, 2nd
International Workshop on Computational History and Data-Driven
Humanities (CHDH), Dublin, Ireland, 2016. (Extended Abstract in
Proceedings) (pdf).
Laurentiu Vasiliu, Ross McDermott, Malek Ben Khaled, Tobias Daudert, David Byrne, Manuela Huerlimann, Sergio Fernández, Angelo Cavallini, André Freitas, Frederico Carol, Manel Zarrouk and Brian Davis, In or Out? Real-Time Monitoring of BREXIT sentiment on Twitter, SEMANTiCS Conference, Leipzig, 2016. (Poster in Proceedings) (pdf).
Manuela Hürlimann, Brian Davis, Keith Cortis, André Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh and Sergio Fernández, A Twitter Sentiment Gold Standard for the Brexit Referendum, SEMANTiCS Conference, Leipzig, 2016. (Poster in Proceedings) (pdf).
Alan Smeaton, Kevin McGuinness, Gurrin Cathal, Jiang Zhou, Noel O'Connor, Peng Wang, Brian Davis, Lucas Azevedo, André Freitas, Louise Signal, Moira Smith, James Stanley, Michelle Barr, Tim Chambers and Cliona Ni Mhurchu, Semantic Indexing of Wearable Camera Images: Kids'Cam Concepts, iV&L-MM workshop @ ACM Multimedia, 2016. (Workshop Paper) (pdf).
Chris Biemann, Siegfried Handschuh, André
Freitas, Farid Meziane, Elisabeth Métais (Editors), Data and
Knowledge Engineering, Special Issue on Natural Language
Processing and Information Systems (NLDB 2015), 2016.
Siamak Barzegar, Juliano Efson Sales, André Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh, Brian Davis, DINFRA: A One Stop Shop for Computing Multilingual Semantic Relatedness, In Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference, Santiago, Chile, 2015 (Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf) .
Juliano Efson Sales, André Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh, Brian Davis, Linse: A Distributional Semantics Entity Search Engine, In Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference, Santiago, Chile, 2015. (Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf) .
André Freitas, João C. Pereira da Silva, Edward Curry, Paul Buitelaar, Approximate and Selective Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs: A Distributional Semantics Approach. Data Knowledge Engineering (DKE). (2015). Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE) 100: 211-225, 2015 (Article) (pdf).
Chris Biemann, Siegfried Handschuh, André Freitas, Farid Meziane, Elisabeth Métais, Natural Language Processing and Information Systems - 20th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2015 Passau, Germany, June 17-19, 2015 (Proceedings) (link).
André Freitas, Christina Unger, The Schema-agnostic Queries (SAQ-2015) Semantic Web Challenge: Task Description, 12th Extended Semantic Web Conference, Portoroz, Slovenia, 2015. (pdf) .
André Freitas, Edward Curry, Big Data Curation, Chapter in New Horizons for a Data-Driven Economy: A Roadmap for Usage and Exploitation of Big Data in Europe, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2015 (Book Chapter) (link).
Yasar Khan, Muntazir Mehdi, Alokkumar Jha, Saleem Raza, Andre Freitas, Marggie Jones, Ratnesh Sahay, Extending Inner-Ear Anatomical concepts in the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), In proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Bioengineering (BIBE2015), Belgrade, Serbia, 2015 (Conference Paper) (pdf) .
Muntazir Mehdi, Yasar Khan, Andre Freitas, Joao Bosco Jares, Panagiotis Hasapis, Ratnesh Sahay, Demonstrating a Linked Data Platform for Finite Element Biosimulations of Cochlear Mechanics, In proceedings of the 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2015, Pennsylvania, United States, 2015 (Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf) .
Muntazir Mehdi, Yasar Khan, Andre Freitas, Joao Bosco Jares, Stefan Decker, Ratnesh Sahay, A Linked Data Platform for Finite Element Bio-Simulations, In proceedings of the SEMANTiCS, Vienna, Austria, 2015 (Full Conference Paper) (pdf) .
André Freitas, Edward Curry, Natural Language Queries over Heterogeneous Linked Data Graphs: A Distributional-Compositional Semantics Approach, In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Haifa, 2014. (Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
João C. Pereira da Silva, André Freitas, Towards An Approximative Ontology-Agnostic Approach for Logic Programs, In Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems (FoIKS), Bordeaux, 2014. (Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
André Freitas, João Carlos Pereira Da Silva, Edward Curry, Paul Buitelaar, A Distributional Semantics Approach for Selective Reasoning on Commonsense Graph Knowledge Bases, In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB), Montpellier, 2014. (Full Conference Paper) (pdf).
André Freitas, Rafael Vieira, Edward Curry, Danilo Carvalho, João Carlos Silva, On the Semantic Representation and Extraction of Complex Category Descriptors, In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB), Montpellier, 2014. (Short Conference Paper) (pdf), (extended).
Christina Unger, André Freitas, Philipp Cimiano, Introduction to Question Answering over Linked Data, In Proceedings of the 2014 Reasoning Web Summer School, 2014 (pdf).
André Freitas, João Carlos Pereira Da Silva, Edward Curry, On the Semantic Mapping of Schema-agnostic Queries: A Preliminary Study, Workshop of the Natural Language Interfaces for the Web of Data (NLIWoD), 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Rival del Garda, 2014. (Workshop Short Paper) (pdf), (extended).
André Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh, Edward Curry, Distributional-Relational Models: Scalable Semantics for Databases, AAAI Spring Symposium, Knowledge Representation & Reasoning Track, Stanford, 2014 (pdf).
André Freitas, João C. Pereira da Silva, Semantics at Scale: When Distributional Semantics meets Logic Programming, ALP Newsletter, 2014 (pdf).
André Freitas, Edward Curry, Siegfried Handschuh, Towards a Distributional Semantic Web Stack, 10th International Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW 2014), 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Rival del Garda, 2014. (Position Paper) (pdf).
André Freitas, Kartik Asooja, Joao Jares, Stefan Decker and Ratnesh Sahay, A Semantic Web Platform for Improving the Automation and Reproducibility of Finite Element Bio-simulation, Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences (SWAT4LS), Berlin, 2014 (pdf).
André Freitas, Kartik Asooja, Swapnil Soni, Marggie Jones, Panagiotis Hasapis and Ratnesh Sahay, Towards a Semantic Web Platform for Finite Element Simulations, In Proceedings of the 11th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Crete, 2014. (Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf).
Danilo Carvalho, Çağatay Çallı, André Freitas, Edward Curry, EasyESA: A Low-effort Infrastructure for Explicit Semantic Analysis, In Proceedings of the 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Rival del Garda, 2014. (Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf).
Big Data Curation Technical Whitepaper, BIG Project Report, 2014. (Technical Report) (pdf).
André Freitas, Fabricio de Faria, Sean O'Riain, Edward Curry, Answering Natural Language Queries over Linked Data Graphs: A Distributional Semantics Approach, In Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 2013. (Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf).
André Freitas, João C. P. da Silva, Sean O’Riain, Edward Curry, Distributional Relational Networks, AAAI Fall Symposium, Arlington, 2013 (Conference Paper) (pdf).
André Freitas, Edward Curry, Do it yourself (DIY) Jeopardy QA System, In Proceedings of the 12th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Sydney, 2013 (Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf).
André Freitas, João C. Pereira da Silva, Danilo S. Carvalho, Sean O'Riain, Edward Curry, Representing Texts as Contextualized Entity-Centric Linked Data Graphs, 12th International Workshop on Web Semantics and Web Intelligence (WebS 2013), 24th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA), Prague, 2013. (Workshop Full Paper) (pdf).
André Freitas, Sean O'Riain and Edward Curry, A Distributional Semantic Search Infrastructure for Linked Dataspaces, In Proceedings of the 10th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Montpellier, France, 2013. (Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf).
Danilo S. Carvalho, André Freitas and João C. Pereira da Silva, Graphia: Extracting Contextual Relation Graphs from Text, In Proceedings of the 10th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Montpellier, France, 2013. (Demonstration Paper in Proceedings) (pdf).
André Freitas, Sean O'Riain and Edward Curry, Crossing the Vocabulary Gap for Querying Complex and Heterogeneous Databases: A Distributional-Compositional Semantics Perspective, 3rd Workshop on Data Extraction and Object Search (DEOS), 29th British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD), Oxford, UK, 2013. (Abstract).
André Freitas, Danilo S. Carvalho, João C. Pereira da Silva, Extracting Linked Data Graphs from Texts: An Ontology-Agnostic Approach, 3rd Workshop on Data Extraction and Object Search (DEOS), 29th British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD), Oxford, UK, 2013. (Abstract).
André Freitas, Margaret Jones, Kartik Asooja, Christos Bellos, Steve Elliott, Stefan Stenfelt, Panagiotis Hasapis, Christos Georgousopoulos, Torsten Marquardt, Nenad Filipovic, Stefan Decker, Ratnesh Sahay, Towards a Semantic Representation for Multi-Scale Finite Element Biosimulation Experiments, 13th IEEE International Conference on BioInformatics and BioEngineering (BIBE), Chania. Greece, 2013. (Conference Paper) (pdf).
André Freitas, Edward Curry, João Gabriel Oliveira, Sean O'Riain, Querying Heterogeneous Datasets on the Linked Data Web: Challenges, Approaches and Trends. IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 16, no. 1, p.24-33, 2012. (Article) (link) (slides).
André Freitas, Edward Curry, Sean O'Riain, A Distributional Approach for Terminological Semantic Search on the Linked Data Web. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC), Semantic Web and Applications (SWA), 2012. (Conference Full Paper) (pdf) (slides).
André Freitas, Danilo S. Carvalho, João Carlos Pereira da Silva, Sean O'Riain, Edward Curry, A Semantic Best-Effort Approach for Extracting Structured Discourse Graphs from Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on the Web of Linked Entities (WoLE 2012) at the 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2012 (Workshop Full Paper) (pdf).
André Freitas, Benedikt Kämpgen, João Gabriel Oliveira, Sean O'Riain, Edward Curry, Representing Interoperable Provenance Descriptions for ETL Workflows. ESWC 2012 Workshop Highlights, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer Verlag, 2012. (Extended Paper published in Conf. Proceedings.) (pdf).
André Freitas, Benedikt Kämpgen, João Gabriel Oliveira, Sean O'Riain, Edward Curry, Representing Interoperable Provenance Descriptions for ETL Workflows. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Role of Semantic Web in Provenance Management (SWPM 2012), Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Heraklion, Crete, 2012. (Workshop Full Paper) (pdf) (slides).
Tope Omitola, André Freitas, Edward Curry, Sean O'Riain, Nicholas Gibbins and Nigel Shadbolt. Capturing Interactive Data Transformation Operations using Provenance Workflows. ESWC 2012 Workshop Highlights, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer Verlag, 2012. (Extended Paper published in Conf. Proceedings) (pdf).
Tope Omitola, André Freitas, Edward Curry, Sean O'Riain, Nicholas Gibbins and Nigel Shadbolt. Capturing Interactive Data Transformation Operations using Provenance Workflows. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Role of Semantic Web in Provenance Management (SWPM 2012), Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Heraklion, Crete, 2012. (Workshop Full Paper) (pdf) (slides).
André Freitas, João Gabriel
Oliveira, Sean O'Riain, Edward Curry, João Carlos Pereira da
Silva, Treo: Combining Entity-Search, Spreading
Activation and Semantic Relatedness for Querying Linked Data,
In 1st Workshop on Question Answering over Linked Data
(QALD-1) Workshop at 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference
(ESWC), 2011 (Workshop Full Paper) (pdf).
Lauane Baroncelli,
André Freitas, The Visibility of the Self on the
Web: A Struggle for Recognition, In Proceedings of 3rd
ACM International Conference on Web Science, 2011 (Poster in
Proceedings) (pdf).
Kelli de Faria Cordeiro, Fabricio Firmino de Faria, Bianca de Oliveira Pereira, André Freitas, João Vitor Villas Boas Freitas, Ana Christina Bringuente, Lucas de Oliveira Arantes, Rodrigo Calhau, Veruska Zamborlini, Maria Luiza Machado Campos, Giancarlo Guizzardi, An Approach for Managing and Semantically Enriching the Publication of Linked Open Governmental Data, 3rd Workshop of Applied Computing in Electronic Government (WCGE), In WEBMEDIA/SBBD, 2011 (Workshop Full Paper) (pdf) (slides).
Tomas Knap, André Freitas, Irena Mlynkova, Web Quality Assessment Model, Technical Report, 2011 (Technical Report) (pdf).
André Freitas,
Arnaud Legendre, Sean O'Riain, Edward Curry, Prov4J:
A Semantic Web Framework for Generic Provenance Management.
In The Second International Workshop on Role of Semantic Web
in Provenance Management (SWPM 2010), Springer, Workshop at
International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Shanghai, China,
2010. (Workshop Full Paper) (pdf) (slides).
Edward Curry,
André Freitas, Sean O’Riain, The Role of Community-Driven Data Curation for Enterprises. In David Wood (ed.), Linking Enterprise Data,
Springer, 2010. (Book Chapter) (link) (pdf)
(slides).
Academic:
Open Source Projects:
EasyESA