Searching the news Using a rich ontology with time-bound roles to search through annotated newspaper archives Wouter van Atteveldt1, Nel Ruigrok2, Stefan Schlobach1, and Frank van Harmelen1 1 Department of Arti¯cial Intelligence Free University Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1071, 1071 HV Amsterdam fwva,schlobac,
[email protected] 2 The Netherlands News Monitor University of Amsterdam Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam
[email protected] Abstract. A frequent motivation for annotating documents using ontologies is to allow more e±cient search. For collections of newspaper articles, it is often di±cult to ¯nd spe- ci¯c articles based on keywords or topics alone. This paper describes a system that uses a formalisation of the content of newspaper articles to answer complex queries. The data for this system is created using Relational Content Analysis, a method used in Communication Sciences in which documents are annotated using a rich annotation scheme based on an on- tology that includes political roles with temporal validity. Using custom inferencing over the temporal relations and query translation, our system can be used to search for and browse through newspaper articles and to perform systematic analyses by evaluating queries against all articles in the corpus. This makes the system useful both for the (Social) Scientist and for interested laypersons. 1 Introduction A number of services exist that o®er keyword-based search of news content, such as Google news3 and LexisNexis4. Such services have severe limitations, however. The ¯rst di±culty is the semantic gap between keywords and meaning that is always present in keyword based search.