Personal Research Assistant for Online Exploration of Historical News

Abstract

We present a novel environment for exploratory search in large collections of historical newspapers developed as a part of the NewsEye project. In this paper we focus on the intelligent Personal Research Assistant (PRA) component in the environment and the web interface. The PRA is an interactive exploratory engine that combines results of various text analysis tools in an unsupervised fashion to conduct autonomous investigations on the data according to users' needs. The PRA is freely available online together with some datasets of European historical newspapers. The methods used by the assistant are of potential benefit to other exploratory search applications.