This chapter investigates the threat of unwanted inferences in Semantic Web data. We survey the current efforts to detect and remove unwanted inferences, identify research gaps, and recommend future research directions. We begin with a brief overview of Semantic Web technologies and reasoning methods, followed by the description of the inference problem in traditional databases. In the context ...

Research shows recruiters infer dispositional characteristics from job applicants’ resumes and use these inferences in evaluating applicants’ employability. However, the reliability and validity of these inferences have not been empirically tested. Using data collected from 244 recruiters, we found low levels of estimated interrater reliability when they reviewed entry-level applicants’ resumes...

Sentences with disjunction in the scope of a universal quantifier, Every A is P or Q, tend to give rise to distributive inferences that each of the disjuncts holds of at least one individual in the domain of the quantifier, Some A is P & Some A is Q. These inferences are standardly derived as an entailment of the meaning of the sentence together with the scalar implicature that it is not the ca...

Recent studies show the remarkable power of fine-grained information disclosed by users on social network sites to infer users' personal characteristics via predictive modeling. Similar fine-grained data are being used successfully in other commercial applications. In response, attention is turning increasingly to the transparency that organizations provide to users as to what inferences are dr...

Humans regularly exploit analogical reasoning to generate potentially novel and useful inferences. We outline the Dr Inventor model that identifies analogies between research publications, describing recent work to evaluate the inferences that are generated by the system. Its inferences, in the form of subjectverb-object triples, can involve arbitrary combinations of source and target informati...

In three experiments, healthy young participants listened to stories promoting inferences and named inference-related test words presented to the right visual field-Left Hemisphere (rvf-LH) or to the left visual field-Right Hemisphere (lvf-RH). Participants showed priming for predictive inferences only for target words presented to the lvf-RH; in contrast, they showed priming for coherence infe...

Much recent evidence shows that preschoolers are sensitive to the accuracy of an informant. Faced with two informants, one of whom names familiar objects accurately and the other inaccurately, preschoolers subsequently prefer to learn the names and functions of unfamiliar objects from the more accurate informant. This study examined the inference process underlying this preference. We asked whe...