The Impact of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The UKeiG Members’ Day, held at CILIP HQ on Friday 7th June 2019, showcased three experts: Michael Upshall (UNSILO), David Haynes (City, University of London) and Dr. Tony Russell-Rose (UXLabs, 2dSearch.) The event explored the impact of artificial intelligence on the knowledge, information management and library profession. Upshall kicked off the event by throwing down a gauntlet. Were taxonomies still relevant in an age when AI was transforming search by enabling concept clustering and semantic enrichment? Manual classification schemes, vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies have always played an essential role in information retrieval but Upshall argues that they are expensive and fundamentally flawed; reactive not proactive. “They will never be complete. They will never be large enough.” Haynes went on to explore the potential impact of AI on the information resource management cycle, leaving Russell Rose to deliver an illuminating crash course on the linguistic phenomena that make natural language processing (NLP) such a complex and multi-faceted field of research. “Language is ambiguous,” he said, “and the key tenet of NLP is resolving that ambiguity.” There was a consensus amongst the delegates that there are huge challenges and opportunities ahead for the LIS profession; that information science is fundamental to AI. Keywords: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Alogorithms, Information Retrieval, Search, Machine Learning, Taxonomies, Natural Language Processing, NLP, Information Science.