Conversational Graph-Based Navigation Over Semantically Connected Content

COGNOSCO (from Latin cognōscere: to discover/learn/know), a research project in collaboration with Springer Nature, aims at investigating conversational search systems that enable explorative navigation in scientific knowledge bases. Digital publication repositories provide access to millions of scientific documents from conferences, journals, workshops, or books. Various scenarios how scientists discover and learn new insights from these resources are considered. In this context, conversational search systems can interact with humans naturally and offer assistance. With the help of knowledge graphs, structured as well as unstructured textual data are semantically linked during the information search and presented in an understandable format. The search process itself is controlled by an interactive text-based dialog optimized with regard to the user's information goal. In addition to the theoretical contributions of the project, a prototype system is developed and evaluated in real-world settings.