Interactive summaries by multi- pole information extraction for the archaeological domain

Understanding and describing past or present societies is a complex task, as it involves a multi-faceted analysis of the norms, interactions, and evolutions that characterize them. This serves as the motivation for developing a tool, named Herodotus, aiming at supporting domain experts, such as historians or archaeologists, in the reasoning tasks over complex interactions characterizing a society in order to explain why some event took place and, possibly, to predict what could happen when some factors change. An important part of Herodotus is the text mining module that is responsible for the extraction of knowledge from written sources, such as books and scientific papers. Machines cannot always help users in dealing with natural language, because of the variety, ambiguity and non-rigidity that language shows in its use; they can only try to process information in a meaningful way for users. Information Extraction (IE) is the technology that pulls specific information from large volumes of unstructured texts and stores this information in structured forms. Users can then consult, compose, and analyze them. Domain-based IE should focus on an analysis of a specific state of affairs and, in this way, it can obtain more precise and detailed results. This helps domain experts to deal with the complexity of their everyday objects and environments. This chapter is centered on the Interactive Summary Extractor tool, whose scope is to organize, in a partially automated but substantially interactive way, text summaries for archaeological and historical documental sources. The texts so analyzed will help domain experts to collect data, viewing a synthesized version of it, compose such summaries in units of sense for the particular archaeological study or research that is in place, and so on. Summaries can then be modified, stored, retrieved and managed for later elaboration.