TAP-XL: An Automated Analyst's Assistant

The TAP-XL Automated Analyst’s Assistant is an application designed to help an Englishspeaking analyst write a topical report, culling information from a large inflow of multilingual, multimedia data. It gives users the ability to spend their time finding more data relevant to their task, and gives them translingual reach into other languages by leveraging human language technology. 1 System Description The TAP-XL system exploits language technology to monitor the user’s interactions with the system and provide suggestions of relevant information to analysts, maximizing time spent reading relevant documents and writing reports. Any document, passage, or fact that a user saves in a report is deemed to be valuable, and the TAP-XL system then proactively suggests related information that is located in the stream of documents. Rather than force the user to learn a suite of distinct tools, this “suggestion” metaphor is employed throughout TAP-XL: all language technologies pull together to bring value to the user through data, rather than via additional tools, interfaces, and metaphors that must be learned separately.