Knowledge management and human language: crossing the chasm

Purpose: To facilitate the adoption of recent developments in human language technology as part of next-generation knowledge management products. Design: The paper starts off by describing application scenarios, then provides a highlevel introduction to human language technology (more specifically information extraction), discusses how these tools are applied in practical settings, and provides a concrete example. Findings: Provides a detailed discussion on when and how human language technology can be applied to knowledge management, including performance evaluation and ease of adoption. Value: This paper addresses the problem of how to bridge the gap between the need for semantic-based knowledge management on one hand and the predominantly unstructured, textual nature of corporate data.