Applications include information retrieval, passage retrieval, relevance feedback, information extraction, and summarization. Our results will be used directly in ongoing research projects on the automatic summarization of documents, using both statistical and information extraction techniques. To the extent that our techniques are based on linguistically-motivated patterns and not on domain-dependent vocabularies, our patterns should apply to general text. We will apply our approach to several domains to test its generality and applicability across document types. This will permit us to measure the cost of porting across genres. Formative and summative evaluation procedures will be developed and performed at each step of the analysis.
This research will be undertaken in the context of the Digital Library Research program at Columbia University, in conjunction with the Center for Research on Information Access.