| Aaron Coburn Lead Developer, Semantic Indexing Project Middlebury College |
Clara Yu President Monterey Institute of International Studies |
| John L. Cuadrado Consulting Chief Scientist, NITLE Semantic Engine (NSE) National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) |
The quantity of digital text continues to expand at unprecedented rates, and attempts to categorize the information with metadata have not kept pace with this growth. As a result, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has supported the development of the NITLE Semantic Engine (NSE), a tool to address the issue of bringing order to large quantities of otherwise unstructured text. In a completely automated process, using word distribution and co-occurrence statistics, this tool exceeds simple keyword search capabilities by making inferences about the semantic relationship among documents. As an “expanded recall” search engine, the NSE will display relevant documents that may not contain the original query term. In addition, search results are automatically grouped into semantically coherent clusters, and interactive visualizations help a user explore the underlying associations among documents. This presentation will describe both the network-based tool and the desktop application as tools for exploring and navigating large collections of textual information.
http://www.knowledgesearch.org
Handout (MS Word)