June 16th, 3 pm the Thesis Defense: "A WordNet based backend for the Interactive Concept Validation (ICV)" by Ingrid Tchilibou will take place at HCC Lab.

Abstract

Summarizing and categorizing a large quantity of ideas to generate new and interesting ideas is a promising process, also called idea synthesis. However, the collected ideas are usually very extensive, which takes a lot of time when categorizing them manually. A Software could help analysts to oversee large quantities in order to categorize faster and better synthesize new ideas. This thesis deals with the question on whether WordNet hypernyms are helpful in categorizing a group of ideas. To use WordNet hypernyms it is necessary to first annotate the ideas with the meaning (synset) of each word contained in an idea (so-called Word-Sense-Disambiguation). For this purpose a WordNet connection for the existing ICV (Interactive Concept Validation) tool was im- plemented in this thesis. Furthermore, several possibilities of categorization were implemented and tested in an expert interview. The interview showed that hypernyms cannot be considered in terms of the amount of ideas that are grouped as categories. On the other hand, the interview showed that hypernyms can help in giving an orientation on the main context in the ideas. These observations provide a base for the further development and improvement of WordNet-based categorization approaches.

The defence will be held in german.

First assessor: Prof. Dr. Claudia Müller-Birn
Second assessor: Prof. Dr. Lutz Prechelt