Research topics in e-discovery by William Webber.
From the post:
Dr. Dave Lewis is visiting us in Melbourne on a short sabbatical, and yesterday he gave an interesting talk at RMIT University on research topics in e-discovery. We also had Dr. Paul Hunter, Principal Research Scientist at FTI Consulting, in the audience, as well as research academics from RMIT and the University of Melbourne, including Professor Mark Sanderson and Professor Tim Baldwin. The discussion amongst attendees was almost as interesting as the talk itself, and a number of suggestions for fruitful research were raised, many with fairly direct relevance to application development. I thought I’d capture some of these topics here:
E-discovery, if you don’t know, is found in civil litigation and government investigations. Think of it as hacking with rules as the purpose of e-discovery is to find information that supports your claims or defense. E-discovery is high stakes data mining that pays very well. Need I say more?
Webber lists the following research topics:
- Classification across heterogeneous document types
- Automatic detection of document types
- Faceted categorization
- Label propagation across related documents
- Identifying unclassifiable documents
- Identifying poor training examples
- Identifying significant fragments in non-significant text
- Routing of documents to specialized trainers
- Total cost of annotation
“Label propagation across related documents” looks like a natural for topic maps but searching over defined properties that identify subjects as opposed to opaque tokens would enhance the results for a number of these topics.