A Novel Web-Oriented Writing Environment Using Objects´ Facts Acquired from the Web

This paper presents a novel web-oriented writing environment that helps users describe their opinions on topics/events through weblogs, by showing facts related to the objects. Our writing environment automatically recognizes information needs for facts on aspects (e.g., "opening hours") of the objects (e.g., "J\´s cafe") by applying lexico- syntactic patterns to the snapshots of users\´ writings. It then attempts to extract facts that satisfy the information needs from the Web, and shows the extracted facts (e.g., "opening hours"-"10am-8:30pm") to the users. The users can thus refer to necessary facts without searching the web by themselves. We realized this environment for Japanese on a browser with AJAX, and evaluated how much useful information could be provided by our environment.