In the project HyLaP, hybrid language and information processing methods will be improved,
adapted and applied to a novel personal information access and management application. The
application will facilitate the integrated access to both information in the user's own digital
information space and on the global information structure of the WWW. Since we assume that
language will remain the predominant medium for the storage and transfer of complex information
including human knowledge, natural language processing methods will be key technologies for the
exploitation of the abundance of information in daily work.
The resulting technology will combine open and closed domain question answering, named
entity recognition, relation detection, automatic hyperlinking, and technology-assisted ontology
building. Therefore, the research planned in HyLaP will continue the DFKI LT Lab's research and
technology development in question answering (QA), information extraction (IE), natural language-enhanced information
retrieval, and ontology-based knowledge extraction from human-language documents. This includes
the participation in competitive mono- and crosslingual QA evaluation exercises. It also includes
the ongoing search for effective and efficient hybrid language processing architectures.
The project will employ a combination of shallow and deep language technology methods for
building a structured associative personal digital memory from a realistic large-volume collection of
unstructured documents and structured data reflecting the digital information space of an individual
user.
The goal is to demonstrate the virtues of such a structured memory together with improved IE
and QA methods in an application that serves as intuitive and powerful associative interface
between the user's thought and work on the one side and relevant related information in his personal
memory and on the Internet on the other side.
The project has three main components:
- Open domain question answering (ODQA)
- Personal digital associative memory (PDAM)
- Associative information access and management application (AIAMA)
which are established in two sub-projects:
- HyLaP-QA for the research on open domain question answering
- HyLaP-AM for the research on personal digital associative memory and application building.
HyLaP is funded from 2006-2008 as a three-year project by the German Federal Ministery
for Research (BMBF) under contract 01 IW F02.
