The 30th IPP Symposium
Practical Knowledge Representation for Efficient Information Access
Bill Woods, Sun Microsystems
Finding information and organizing information so that it can be found are two key problems for any knowledge-management system. This talk describes an experiment combining the respective strengths of humans and computers in a knowledge-based system to help people find information in text. Unlike many previous attempts, this system demonstrates a substantial improvement in search effectiveness by using linguistic and world knowledge and exploiting sophisticated knowledge-representation techniques. The system uses taxonomic subsumption technology on a large scale to organize and access domain-independent linguistic and world knowledge. It integrates syntactic, semantic, and morphological relationships to help solve some of the paraphrase problems that occur when there are terminology differences between what you ask for and what you need to find.
