KnowNow: A serendipity-based educational tool for learning time-linked knowledge

In this paper we present the system KnowNow, a tool whose aim is to let the users navigate into text corpora through dynamic semantic information networks, created in real-time according to delimited time ranges. In educational scenarios, students are often asked to write short essays on different topics linked by temporal information. This usually involves a combination of several aspects to be evaluated, such as knowledge, imagination, structure and presentation. In the light of this, the introduction of Natural Language Understanding techniques together with cross-topic navigation and visualization tools and considerably help students to retrieve, link, and create well-structured and original contributions, as we demonstrate by using KnowNow. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.