MobEx

 

MobEx is a mobile touchable application for online topic graph extraction and exploration of web content.

The system has been implemented for operation on a tablet computer, i.e. an Apple iPad, and on a mobile device, i.e. Apple iPhone or iPod touch. The initial information request, in the form of a query topic description, is issued online by a user to the system. The system then retrieves web snippets using standard and specialised search engines. These snippets are passed through a chain of specially designed NLP components which perform an on demand (or ad hoc) Named Entity Recognition, Relation-, and Information Extraction tasks. By on demand or ad hoc we mean the components are capable to perform their operations on an unrestricted open domain within special time constraints – the whole process does not take more than 5 seconds including I/O operations. The result is a topic graph containing the detected Named Entities as nodes and the extracted relationships between these nodes as labelled edges between the nodes.

This topic graph can then be further analyzed by users so that they can request additional background information with the help of interesting nodes and pairs of nodes in the topic graph, e.g., explicit relationships extracted from Wikipedia or those automatically extracted from additional Web content as well as conceptual information of the topic in form of semantically oriented clusters of descriptive phrases. This information is presented to the users, who can investigate the identified information nuggets to refine their information search.

For more information please contact me: schmeier [at] dfki.de