State-of-the-Art Tools for More Efficient Information Discovery and Analysis

Information discovery and analysis can be enabled by a wide-range of technologies. Typically analysts have to perform data searches against very large heterogeneous repositories, extract information from result sets, summarize and interpret the results, and form conclusions based on the results. In intelligent information access, tools can facilitate these activities for the analyst throughout the process, decreasing task time and increasing comprehensiveness and accuracy of search if tools are appropriately chosen and applied. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of five intelligent information access technologies: information retrieval, summarization, information extraction, text clustering, and question answering. We aim to provide a brief characterization of state of the art in each area, point to some example tools, and indicate the potential benefit of each of these areas to end users.