Managing mining project documentation using human language technology

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to develop a system, which would enable efficient management and exploitation of documentation in electronic form, related to mining projects, with information retrieval and information extraction (IE) features, using various language resources and natural language processing. Design/methodology/approach The system is designed to integrate textual, lexical, semantic and terminological resources, enabling advanced document search and extraction of information. These resources are integrated with a set of Web services and applications, for different user profiles and use-cases. Findings The use of the system is illustrated by examples demonstrating keyword search supported by Web query expansion services, search based on regular expressions, corpus search based on local grammars, followed by extraction of information based on this search and finally, search with lexical masks using domain and semantic markers. Originality/value The presented system is the first software solution for implementation of human language technology in management of documentation from the mining engineering domain, but it is also applicable to other engineering and non-engineering domains. The system is independent of the type of alphabet (Cyrillic and Latin), which makes it applicable to other languages of the Balkan region related to Serbian, and its support for morphological dictionaries can be applied in most morphologically complex languages, such as Slavic languages. Significant search improvements and the efficiency of IE are based on semantic networks and terminology dictionaries, with the support of local grammars.