Pol Mac Aonghusa – knowledge extraction

“Isn’t this project just like a search engine?”

The behaviour change party: imagine you go to a party, where the guests double every hour, but you are only allowed to speak to 13 people, how easy would it be to keep track of all guests interests at the party? – Impossible. Pol uses this analogy to explain why the ontology is required, so that researchers can speak to more (or ideally all) people at the party.

Critically, the system to be developed is tasked to not only extract one or two relevant reports (like google perhaps would) but to extract ALL relevant reports and summarise them for easier reading. Moreover, it will need to weight studies and reports by their quality and importance without introducing bias or opinion.

The challenges of this project are 1) to ‘de-noise’ the data without losing information; 2) to understand what an author really meant; 3) join knowledge from many sources; 4) assign confidence to the results; and 5) make it work in a reasonable timeframe.