Applications

At its core, Saffron has been developed as a term and taxonomy extraction tool for application in expert finding. However, the core Saffron algorithms enable also a wider range of applications, from knowledge graph development and text analytics to social network analysis.

Knowledge graphs are semantically structured symbolic representations of concepts and relations between them, enabling reasoning for applications such as semantic search, question answering, dialog systems (chatbots) and others. Saffron provides the tools for a bottom up approach to knowledge graph development through term extraction for automatic identification of relevant concepts and through taxonomy extraction for automatic identification of subsumption relations between extracted concepts. A core assumption in the application of Saffron for knowledge graph development is that a coherent document collection is available that represents a community, organization or domain of application.

Social network analysis (SNA) is concerned with the automatic identification of hubs and clusters of members in a network such as in scientific publishing or social media. Often, SNA is based on structured data such as co-authorship on scientific publications or communication trails. Such analysis can be enriched with content analysis on underlying unstructured textual data from the scientific publications or social media posts. In particular, Saffron can be used here to automatically identify communities based on shared use of terminology.

Text analytics, in particular for survey analysis, has been identified in recent years as a further application area for Saffron. Surveys often have one or more open ended questions, where respondents can fill in their remarks in an unstructured textual format, rather than by use of structured means such as radio buttons or Likert scales. The term extraction functionality of Saffron can be used in this context to extract meaningful, recurring concepts that can be further statistically analyzed through integration with data analytics platforms.