Improving information gathering for IT experts. : Combining text summarization and individualized information recommendation.

Sammanfattning

Information gathering and information overload is an ever growing topic of concernfor Information Technology (IT) experts. The amount of information dealt withon an everyday basis is large enough to take up valuable time having to scatterthrough it all to find the relevant information. As for the application area of IT,time is directly related to money as having to waste valuable production time ininformation gathering and allocation of human resources is a direct loss of profitsfor any given company. Two issues are mainly addressed through this thesis: textsare too lengthy and the difficulty of finding relevant information. Through the useof Natural Language Processes (NLP) methods such as topic modelling and textsummarization, a proposed solution is constructed in the form of a technical basiswhich can be implemented in most business areas. An experiment along with anevaluation session is setup in order to evaluate the performance of the technical basisand enforce the focus of this paper, namely ”How effective is text summarizationcombined with individualized information recommendation in improving informationgathering of IT experts?”. Furthermore, the solution includes a construction of userprofiles in an attempt to individualize content and theoretically present more relevantinformation. The results for this project are affected by the substandard quality andmagnitude of data points, however positive trends are discovered. It is stated thatthe use of user profiles further enhances the amount of relevant articles presentedby the model along with the increasing recall and precision values per iteration andaccuracy per number of updates made per user. Not enough time is spent as for theextent of the evaluation process to confidently state the validity of the results morethan them being inconsistent and insufficient in magnitude. However, the positivetrends discovered creates further speculations on if the project is given enough timeand resources to reach its full potential. Essentially, one can theoretically improveinformation gathering by summarizing texts combined with individualization.