What a Publication Tells You -- Benefits of Narrative Information Access in Digital Libraries

TL;DR

This paper advocates for narrative information access in digital libraries, emphasizing context-aware querying to improve validity of results, demonstrated through Covid-19 questions and applicable to other fields.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of narrative information access, highlighting the importance of context in query processing for more valid knowledge retrieval.

Findings

Context-aware queries yield more valid results.

Narrative information access benefits Covid-19 information retrieval.

Potential applicability to political science and other domains.

Abstract

Knowledge bases allow effective access paths in digital libraries. Here users can specify their information need as graph patterns for precise searches and structured overviews (by allowing variables in queries). But especially when considering textual sources that contain narrative information, i.e., short stories of interest, harvesting statements from them to construct knowledge bases may be a serious threat to the statements' validity. A piece of information, originally stated in a coherent line of arguments, could be used in a knowledge base query processing without considering its vital context conditions. And this can lead to invalid results. That is why we argue to move towards narrative information access by considering contexts in the query processing step. In this way digital libraries can allow users to query for narrative information and supply them with valid answers. In this paper we define narrative information access, demonstrate its benefits for Covid 19 related questions, and argue on the generalizability for other domains such as political sciences.