Authors:
Serge Linckels
and
Christoph Meinel
Affiliation:
Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI), University of Potsdam, Germany
Keyword(s):
Multimedia, semantic search engine, natural language, information retrieval, performance, e-Learning.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer-Supported Education
;
e-Learning
;
e-Learning, e-Commerce and e-Society Applications
;
Human-Machine Interface
;
Multimedia
;
Multimedia Databases, Indexing, Recognition and Retrieval
;
Multimedia Systems and Applications
;
Telecommunications
Abstract:
In this paper we present an e-librarian service which is able to retrieve multimedia resources from a knowledge base in a more efficient way than by browsing through an index or by using a simple keyword search. We explored the approach to allow the user to formulate a complete question in natural language.
Our background theory is composed of three steps. Firstly, there is the linguistic pre-processing of the user question. Secondly, there is the semantic interpretation of the user question into a logical and unambiguous form, i.e. ALC terminology. The focus function resolves ambiguities in the question; it returns the best interpretation for a given word in the context of the complete user question. Thirdly, there is the generation of a semantic query, and the retrieval of pertinent documents.
We developed two prototypes: one about computer history (CHESt), and one about fractions in mathematics (MatES). We report on experiments with these prototypes that confirm the feasibility
, the quality and the benefits of such an e-librarian service. From 229 different user questions, the system returned for 97% of the questions the right answer, and for nearly half of the questions only one answer, the best one.
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