Generating resource descriptions from metadata to support relevance assessments in retrieval
Alison J. Cawsey, Diana S. Bental, Bruce Eddy, Patrick McAndrew · 2000
We present methods for presenting descriptions of online resources that will help the user assess their likely relevance without having to download them. These descriptions are based on metadata describing a resource. Two approaches are explored. The first uses current XML-based standards and tools (XSLT and RDF) to offer tailored tabular presentations from selected metadata. The second uses natural language generation techniques to create concise textual descriptions. Both approaches tailor descriptions according to user interests using a simple user profile based on stereotypes. Introduction Searching for relevant online documents, whether multimedia or text, is an interactive process involving relevance judgements by the user as well as the search engine. A search engine may retrieve a list of documents which are rated as relevant to the query, but it is then over to the user to examine this imperfect list to find those that are most likely to be genuinely useful given their infor...