LoLaLi is short for "Logic and Language Links," the project was carried out by the University of Amsterdam and Elsevier Science from the year 2002 and 2004 (see The project). This web site contains the material produced from March 2001 and December 2004, when Caterina Caracciolo was involved in it.
The subject of investigation in the LoLaLi project
is a general environments for electronic dissemination of
scientific knowledge of a unifying kind, as traditionally found in a
handbook. The research uses the
Handbook of Logic and Language, edited by van
Benthem and ter Meulen (Elsevier Science in 1997) as a use case. |
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In our vision, a person with some
knowledge of the domain, but not an expert, should be provided
with multiple ways to access a handbook in electronic format.
The entire text should be accessible for reading,
and the text should be queryable to locate words and phrases
in it. In addition, the user should be guided thrugh the domain
covered by the handbook, so that more "vague" information needs can
be supported. The sort of guidance we envision is provded by a map of
the domain, where each topic in the map leads the user to the
specific excerpt of the text where the topic is covered.
Our idea is then to provide the user with an integrated environment,
where a browsable map of the domain is provided with two types of
links: internal to the map, to make explicit (some of) the relations
between concepts in it, and external to map, i.e., connecting the
map to the text. This latter type of links connect concepts to passages
of the book that are internally homogeneous
(concerning the subject presented or discussed).
Such a (hierarchical) map is at the same time a tool for users to explore
the domain and a tool to retrieve relevant excerpts from the text.
In order to ensure maintenance and scalability of the approach (the model
should not only be applicable to the handbook), these links should be automatically
selected.
With the help of domain experts, we have organized concepts from the
domain in a large graph (the LoLaLi map) where concepts are connected by
labeled relationships and provided with glosses. The map is organized
by means of semantic relationships, both hierarchical and
non-hierarchical, that make explicit to the user the relationships
between concepts in the domain.
The connection between the concepts and the text is provided by
hyperlinks to link targets. Link targets are found in two steps
First, the text is divided into passages, then the passages are
matched to the appropriate concepts from the map by means of
information retrieval techniques.
If you want to know more, go to Further details.
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