Database and Information-retrieval Methods for Knowledge Discovery

Our aim here is to advocate for the integration of database-systems (DB) methods and information-retrieval (IR) methods to address applications that are emerging from the ongoing explosion and diversification of digital information. One grand goal of such an endeavor is the automatic building and maintenance of a comprehensive knowledge base of facts from encyclopedic sources and the scientific literature. Facts should be represented in terms of typed entities and relationships and allow expressive queries that return ranked results with precision in an efficient and scalable manner. We thus explore how DB and IR methods might contribute toward this ambitious goal