Project Details
Projekt
Information consolidation: A new paradigm in knowledge search
Subject Area
Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
Term
from 2014 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 245844862
Existing search tools are effective at identifying relevant documents among billions of irrelevant ones. Yet, when users search for non-trivial knowledge on a topic, rather than just having to peek at a couple documents, state of the art technology offers little help. Search engines typically provide lists of documents, but remain weak at isolating the concrete facts of interest within them, and at organizing and presenting these facts concisely and intuitively. Today, searchers have to laboriously skim through many retrieved documents, collect the relevant statements within them and consolidate the largely redundant information in order to acquire coherent knowledge. Our proposal targets what might be the next big step in information access technology: supporting users in identifying and assimilating the large set of relevant statements found within multitudes of target documents. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, combining methods from information retrieval, natural language processing and information science, we propose a novel paradigm for knowledge search. Concretely, we propose developing an automated information consolidation approach that consists of three major processes: (a) automatically extracting key statements from large document sets; (b) consolidating the information in these statements by constructing a statement graph, which specifies the inference relations between all extracted statements; and (c) enabling users to explore the consolidated information in the graph via suitable user interfaces that support effective exploration schemes. We plan to develop algorithms and methods that implement this approach and build a prototype system. As a target domain for testing our approach we chose the field of education policies, which has rich information structure and is considered of high social importance. We will apply our system to information in this domain and will conduct intrinsic as well as extrinsic evaluations, including user studies. Our consortium structure is quite uniquely suitable for realizing our vision, including scientists with complementary skills from all involved disciplines.
DFG Programme
DIP Programme
International Connection
Israel
