Using Concept Maps as a Cross-Language Summarization
Tool
William Ryan Richardson
Virginia Tech
Abstract:
A concept map (Novak & Gowin,
1984) is defined as a schematic device used to enable the learner to explicitly
represent a number of concepts and their interrelationships. For the last twenty years, researchers in the
education field have studied concept maps as a means to facilitate the learning
of concepts more quickly and effectively.
The work I am presenting deals with automatically generating them from
text documents, and using them as a summarization tool. The genre of documents I am concentrating on
is electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), of
which there is a large (and growing) number available online, and which remain
a largely untapped resource. From the
outset I consider using concept maps both in monolingual and cross-lingual
(Spanish and English) settings.
The issue of automatic concept map generation raises many
questions such as map layout, node selection, link selection, directionality of
links, node-coloring, etc., and is similar in many ways to automatic generation
of text summaries. The cross-language
issue raises many questions about what machine translation techniques to
use. The use of ETDs
requires techniques that will scale to large documents (hundreds of
pages). Obviously this work deals with
many hard problems and should be viewed as a work in progress.
About the
Speaker:
William Ryan Richardson http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/research/CLIP/colloq/index.html.
Ryan Richardson is a Ph.D. student in the Department of
Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He a member of the Digital
Library Research Laboratory. His research interests include
cross-language information retrieval, concept mapping, and machine
translation. He has worked on the MARIAN
and CITIDEL digital library projects at Virginia Tech. He received a B.A. in Computer Science from
For the colloquium
series schedule, see the UMD Computational http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/research/CLIP/colloq/. If you are interested in meeting with the
speaker, please contact Doug <http://www.glue.umd.edu/~oard/> Oard (oard@umiacs.umd.edu <mailto:oard@umiacs.umd.edu> ).