Automatically extracting the semantic network out of public services to support cities becoming Smart Cities

Automatically extracting the semantic network out of public services to support cities becoming smart cities Joachim Van den Bogaert, Laurens Meeus, Alina Kramchaninova, Arne Defauw, Sara Szoc, Frederic Everaert, Koen Van Winckel, Anna Bardadym, Tom Vanallemeersch, CrossLang NV, Kerkstraat 106, 9050 Gent, Belgium {firstname.lastname}@crosslang.com Abstract The CEFAT4Cities project aims at creat- ing a multilingual semantic interoperabil- ity layer for smart cities that allows users from all EU member states to interact with public services in their own language. The CEFAT4Cities processing pipeline trans- forms natural-language administrative pro- cedures into machine-readable data using various multilingual natural-language pro- cessing techniques, such as semantic net- works and machine translation, thus allow- ing for the development of more sophis- ticated and more user-friendly public ser- vices applications. 1 Introduction To ease interaction with a city’s administrative ser- vices, the creation of a chatbot is an easy and pop- ular option, with many open-source platforms cur- rently available. However, the main challenge lies in filling the bot with the right content, i.e. an ac- curate map that can predict exactly what a user is looking for, together with the relevant next steps to take or suggest. Normally, it takes a dedicated team of experienced editors to create such a “mind map” by collecting content and extracting all rel- evant information. This is a time-consuming pro- cess, even for a very limited use case. Imagine this for multiple use cases, in all EU languages admin- istering a metropolitan area with citizens originat- ing from all over the world. The CEFAT4Cities project1 aims at supporting cities in creating “semantic networks” of their pub- © 2022 The authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence, no derivative works, attribution, CC- BY-ND. 1https://cefat4cities.eu/ lic services, by building a processing pipeline that ingests legacy data from public services (from e.g. websites, administrative forms, existing applica- tions) in multiple EU languages, and transforms this data into a network of connected services that can be used across applications and languages. By connecting the pipeline to the FIWARE Context Broker2, the mind map is made available to any app or sensor within the smart-city IoT network. 2 Methodology To create the semantic network of public services, CEFAT4Cities partners start from a few abstract templates that describe what a public service looks like (who can submit a form to get access to which service, providing which type of proof?) and what the interacting entities look like (are we dealing with an organisation or a citizen?). These abstract templates consist of nodes and links (hence the term “semantic network”) and are provided by the European Interoperability Framework which gov- erns data standards to ensure that data can be used across as many applications as possible.3 Next, these templates are used as extraction fil- ters to transform unstructured human natural lan- guage (i.e. thousands of pages of raw text occur- ring on websites, online forms, etc.) into machine- readable semantic networks which can be utilised in software applications, such as chatbots. The process …

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