Title: SEPIR: a semantic and personalised information retrieval tool for the public administration based on distributional semantics

Authors: Pierpaolo Basile; Annalina Caputo; Marco Di Ciano; Gaetano Grasso; Gaetano Rossiello; Giovanni Semeraro

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Via E. Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy ' Department of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Via E. Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy ' InnovaPuglia S.p.A., c/o Tecnopolis, str. Prov. per Casamassima km. 3, 70010 Valenzano, Bari, Italy ' InnovaPuglia S.p.A., c/o Tecnopolis, str. Prov. per Casamassima km. 3, 70010 Valenzano, Bari, Italy ' Department of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Via E. Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy ' Department of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Via E. Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy

Abstract: This paper introduces a semantic and personalised information retrieval (SEPIR) tool for the public administration of Apulia Region. SEPIR, through semantic search and visualisation tools, enables the analysis of a large amount of unstructured data and the intelligent access to information. At the core of these functionalities is an NLP pipeline responsible for the WordSpace building and the key-phrase extraction. The WordSpace is the key component of the semantic search and personalisation algorithm. Moreover, key-phrases enrich the document representation of the retrieval system and are on the basis of the bubble charts, which provide a quick overview of the main concepts involved in a document collection. We show some of the key features of SEPIR in a use case where the personalisation technique re-ranks the set of relevant documents on the basis of the user's past queries and the visualisation tools provide the users with useful information about the analysed collection.

Keywords: semantic search; personalised information retrieval; NLP; natural language processing; distributional semantics; intelligent information access.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEG.2017.084654

International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2017 Vol.9 No.1/2, pp.132 - 155

Received: 23 May 2016
Accepted: 27 Oct 2016
Published online: 19 Jun 2017 *

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