IIITM-K develops AI search engine for COVID-19 studies

Researchers to be guided to the right information

Published - April 23, 2020 11:18 pm IST - Thiruvananthapuram

The Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala (IIITM-K) has developed an AI semantic search engine to enable researchers to get deeper insights into scientific studies, especially when the need to find an early solution to the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in a large set of complex scientific information.

Named www.vilokana.in, which in Sanskrit means ‘finding out’, the search engine was developed by a team led by A.P. James, Professor at the Centre for Artificial General Intelligence and Neuromorphic Systems (neuroAGI), IIITM-K, as part of the open science initiative of the research centre. Srijit Panja and Akshay Maan are co-authoring a research article based on this work.

Tackling a problem

The search engine will guide researchers to the right information very fast.

This makes easy the contextual search of information from the vast domain of scientific literature, which is a difficult problem faced by scientists and people to get deeper insights into scientific studies.

“This is a good initiative in the fight against COVID-19 as such AI tools can help extract contextual insights from research articles,” a press note quoting Saji Gopinath, CEO, Kerala Startup Mission, and Director, IIITM-K, said.

The user can supply keyword-based queries, the meaning of which the search engine will be able to understand, and find the relevant text from the scientific papers.

Advanced functions

The user also has the option to upload any scientific text for analysis, which can be used for sentiment analysis and knowledge discovery.

The search has several advanced functions such as being able to pick up undiscovered keywords, learning based on popularity, summarise the text and help identify trends.

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