What a Publication Tells You -- Benefits of Narrative Information Access in Digital Libraries

Abstract

Knowledge bases allow effective access paths in digital libraries.Here users can specify their information need as graph patterns for precise searches and structured overviews (by allowing variables in queries). But especially when considering textual sources that contain narrative information, i.e., short stories of interest, harvesting statements from them to construct knowledge bases may be a serious threat to the statements' validity. A piece of information, originally stated in a coherent line of arguments, could be used in a knowledge base query processing without considering its vital context conditions. And this can lead to invalid results. That is why we argue to move towards narrative information access by considering contexts in the query processing step. In this way digital libraries can allow users to query for narrative information and supply them with valid answers. In this paper we define narrative information access, demonstrate its benefits for Covid 19 related questions, and argue on the generalizability for other domains such as political sciences.

On Dimensions of Plausibility for Narrative Information Access to Digital Libraries

“…Moreover, we do not require a universally valid decision, i.e., based on a given ground truth (a theory in physics for example), we can make a narrative plausible, whereas we cannot make the narrative plausible on a different ground truth. While question answering and its methods [19,20,35,35] are related to narrative information access, we see significant differences in the evaluation: Narrative information access considers contexts [26,22], i.e., we do not fuse information from different contexts. For a good example, consider claims from the biomedical domain: Combining claims made when treating mice with claims when treating humans can be a serious threat to the overall validity because no one guarantees that these claims should also be valid for humans then.…”

“…This evidence forms so-called narrative bindings connecting each relationship against a concrete piece of information stated in some knowledge repository, i.e., any form of data storage (e.g., relational databases, knowledge graphs, data sets, etc.). In previous works we formulated a conceptual model [23] for narrative information access, discussed the binding process from a technical perspective [24], showed how queries can be processed over collections of scientific publications [25], and discussed conceptual problems like context compatibility when answering queries over independent knowledge bases [26].…”