Why Information Retrieval needs Cognitive Science: Three case studies and a call to arms
This event took place on Thursday 13 April 2006 at 12:30
Prof. Eduard Hoenkamp Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information
Much of today's success in Information Retrieval (IR) comes from a hard approach: employing blazingly fast machines, ever more refined statistics, and increasingly powerful classification schemes. In recent years, however, the hard approach has entered a phase of diminishing returns.
This talk explores a softer alternative which, we argue, is still in the phase of increasing returns. As the quality of an IR system is ultimately decided by its users, the approach starts from how these users structure information. Interestingly, for this approach many useful principles are readily available in the psychological literature.
We illustrate the approach with three examples. The first applies the cognitive status of `complex nominals' to improve search results by automatically constructing specialized queries. The second shows how the connection between language and imagery at the `basic level' can be used for multimedia retrieval on the World Wide Web. The final example employs the notion of 'semantic space' to make retrieval more effective especially for large scale corpora. In each example the results were substantial. The case studies illustrate how an approach to information retrieval based on cognitive principles can lead to significant, immediate, and fundamental results. It shows how prolific the application of cognitive science to the core of IR can be, and how both disciplines stand to benefit from this approach.
Download Relevant paper, Hoenkamp, E.C.M. (2005). Why Information Retrieval Needs Cognitive Science: A call to arms. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2005, 965-970.
This event took place on Thursday 13 April 2006 at 12:30
Much of today's success in Information Retrieval (IR) comes from a hard approach: employing blazingly fast machines, ever more refined statistics, and increasingly powerful classification schemes. In recent years, however, the hard approach has entered a phase of diminishing returns.
This talk explores a softer alternative which, we argue, is still in the phase of increasing returns. As the quality of an IR system is ultimately decided by its users, the approach starts from how these users structure information. Interestingly, for this approach many useful principles are readily available in the psychological literature.
We illustrate the approach with three examples. The first applies the cognitive status of `complex nominals' to improve search results by automatically constructing specialized queries. The second shows how the connection between language and imagery at the `basic level' can be used for multimedia retrieval on the World Wide Web. The final example employs the notion of 'semantic space' to make retrieval more effective especially for large scale corpora. In each example the results were substantial. The case studies illustrate how an approach to information retrieval based on cognitive principles can lead to significant, immediate, and fundamental results. It shows how prolific the application of cognitive science to the core of IR can be, and how both disciplines stand to benefit from this approach.
Download Relevant paper, Hoenkamp, E.C.M. (2005). Why Information Retrieval Needs Cognitive Science: A call to arms. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2005, 965-970.
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Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...
Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.
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