Keynotes Announcement: Peter Clark

We are pleased to announce that Peter Clark is going to be one of our keynotes!
Here some words about what he’s going to talk about at ESWC 2024

The Semantic Web was born from the need to reason over informal content (e.g., Web text), based on a fundamental premise: computers cannot process most of the information stored on Web pages.
It has led to major advances in knowledge representation, knowledge graphs, reasoning at scale, and more.

Today, though, language models (LMs) have ruptured the original premise: they showing surprising skill at processing text directly, offering new opportunities for knowledge management and the Semantic Web vision.

In this talk, I’ll illustrate three such opportunities we have been exploring: structured reasoning directly over natural language (NL) statements (NL inference); using LMs as tools for building formal and semi-formal world models; and using NL communication between agents to building robust multi-agent services. Finally I’ll speculate on what the future information world might look like with our new LM companions at our side.