Information delivery vehicule: text summarization and question answering

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In today's information society, we have access to an enormous amount of information. Without appropriate thories, technologies, and tools to obtain the information we need in a clear and useful way, there is an ever increasing risk of information overload (or information fatigue), leading to poor information use and inefficiencies in decision-making. Information retrieval engines, text summarizers, and question answering systems provide complementary functionalities which can be combined to serve a variety of users, ranging from the casual user asking questions of the web to a sophisticated knowledge user. A particular useful complementarity exists between text summarization and question answering systems. From the viewpoint of summarization, question answering is a way to provide the focus for the query-based summarization. From the viewpoint of question answering, summarization is a way of extracting and fusing just the relevant information from a heap of text in answer to a specific question. I am interested in developing techniques for delivering information that is appropriate and relevant to the user, avoiding information overload and assisting informed decision making. This will lead to build up systems that capture the user needs and preferences and generate customized and personalized documents. This research proposal deals with ways in which summarization and question answering technologies can be combined to form truly useful information delivery tools. Based on our previous research experience, the purpose of this project is to design and build up tools at several increasingly sophisticated stages. I am planning to develop theories, technologies and tools to deliver to users information that is relevant and appropriate for the users receiving it, information that they can easily assimilate to enable them to perform their tasks, usually enabling better and more efficient decision-making.