Natural Language Processing for Semantic Assistance in Web Portals

Web portals are a major class of web-based content management systems. They can provide users with a single point of access to a multitude of content sources and applications. However, further analysis of content brokered through a portal is not supported by current portal systems, leaving it to their users to deal with information overload. We present the first work examining the integration of natural language processing into web portals to provide users with semantic assistance in analyzing and interpreting content. This integration is based on the portal standard JSR286 and open source NLP frameworks. Two application scenarios, news analysis and biocuration, highlight the feasibility and usefulness of our approach.