Estimating Similarity among Collaboration Contributions
by Murray, K. and Lowrance, J. and Appelt, D. and Rodriguez, A.
in Third International Conference on Knowledge Capture
2005.
Abstract
The need for collaboration arises in many activities re-quired for effective problem solving and decision making. We are developing Angler, a web-services tool that sup-ports collaboration among participants on some focus topic. Angler overcomes some common barriers to collaboration by enabling asynchronous and distributed collaboration. Angler supports a collaboration methodology that exploits opportunities afforded by multiple participants each making contributions to the collaboration. One challenge that arises in helping participants manage their contributions and their review of others’ contributions is determining when one contribution is very similar to another contribution. Two very similar contributions may suggest either a need to merge them or to further elaborate one or both of them. Indexes over the participant contributions are used to assess similarity across contributions and address this challenge. The indexes may comprise lexical or ontological informa-tion; the former indexes require fewer resources to deploy but the later appear to support better similarity estimates.
HARP: Human Augmented Reasoning through Patterning
This project will develop and deploy: 1) cognitive aids that allow humans and machines to "think together" in real-time about complicated problems; 2) techniques to overcome the biases and limitations of the human cognitive system; 3) "cognitive amplifiers" that help teams of people rapidly and fully comprehend complicated and uncertain situations; and, 4) the means to rapidly and seamlessly cut across and complement existing hierarchical organizational structures.
