conTEXT - Lightweight text analytics using linked data

Abstract

The Web democratized publishing - everybody can easily publish information on a Website, Blog, in social networks or microblogging systems. The more the amount of published information grows, the more important are technologies for accessing, analysing, summarising and visualising information. While substantial progress has been made in the last years in each of these areas individually, we argue, that only the intelligent combination of approaches will make this progress truly useful and leverage further synergies between techniques. In this paper we develop a text analytics architecture of participation, which allows ordinary people to use sophisticated NLP techniques for analysing and visualizing their content, be it a Blog, Twitter feed, Website or article collection. The architecture comprises interfaces for information access, natural language processing and visualization. Different exchangeable components can be plugged into this architecture, making it easy to tailor for individual needs. We evaluate the usefulness of our approach by comparing both the effectiveness and efficiency of end users within a task-solving setting. Moreover, we evaluate the usability of our approach using a questionnaire-driven approach. Both evaluations suggest that ordinary Web users are empowered to analyse their data and perform tasks, which were previously out of reach. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.