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.