Intelligent Retrieval for Biodiversity

Abstract

A proposal for intelligent retrieval in the biodiversity domain is described. It applies natural language processing to integrate linguistic and domain knowledge in a mathematical model for information management, formalizing the notion of semantic similarity in different degrees. The goal is to provide computational tools to identify, extract and relate not only data but also scientific notions, even if the information available to start the process is not complete. The use of conceptual graphs as a basis for interpretation makes it possible to avoid the use of classic ontologies, whose start-up requires costly generation and maintenance protocols and also unnecessarily overload the accessing task for inexpert users. We exploit the automatic generation of these structures from raw texts through graphical and natural language interaction, at the same time providing a solid logical and linguistic foundation to sustain the curation of databases.