Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Won 2011 Digging into Data Grant Challenge

Project Title:
Digging into Human Rights Violations: Anaphora Resolution and Emergent Witnesses

Project description:
Unidentified victims, perpetrators, and details of human rights violations are camouflaged by the scale of archival records of witness reports; keyword based search is insufficient to extract them. Digging into Human Rights Violations will develop an automated reader for large text archives of human rights abuses that will reconstruct stories from fragments scattered across a collection, and an interface for navigating those stories. By improving on anaphora resolution techniques in Natural Language Processing for the connection of pronouns to specific nouns, this system will help researchers and courts reveal witnesses and patterns contained in their own collections. This project will read reports of historic disappearances and systemic violence in Guatemala, of abuse against women and children in Burma, and of violent incidents and rights violations in Chechnya, and provide new methods and free tools for human rights advocates.

Principal Investigators:
Ben Miller (Georgia State University), Karthikeyan Umapathy (University of North Florida), Lu Xiao (University of Western Ontario), George Pullman (Georgia State University), and Saurav Karmakar (Georgia State University).

Grant competition link: http://www.diggingintodata.org/
Grant winners listing:
http://www.diggingintodata.org/Home/AwardRecipients2011/tabid/185/Default.aspx
NSF award link: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1209172