Information Access (Level 2)


Purpose

The purpose of this course is to give an introduction to the research on information access and refinement. The notion `information access' refers to development of methods and techniques that enable the user to find texts containing the relevant information, and to do it in a simple and effective way. Information refinement research has as its goal to create models and tools for more advanced text processing, aimed at identifying and presenting these pieces of information that maximally correspond to the current information need of the user. Information refinement includes e.g. information extraction and automatic text summarisation. Current research on information refinement can be characterized as a cross-scientific study, combining communication theory, general linguistics, and language technology.


Contents

The following topics and questions will be treated in the course:
  1. Standard Methods for Information Retrieval and Information Extraction
  2. Standard Methods for Abstracting and Summarisation
  3. Task and User Study
  4. Genre and Domain Identification
  5. Genre, Domain and Task Oriented Text Analysis
  6. Multilingual Information Access and Refinement
  7. Semantic and Pragmatic Theory and Information Refinement Techniques
  8. Evaluation Methods


Prerequisites

Natural Language Processing (Level 1) or the equivalent.