IIITM-K Develops ‘Vilokana’ – A COVID-19 Search Engine for Analysis

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:
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 is developed by a team led by Dr. A.P. James, Professor at 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 Dr. Akshay Maan are co-authoring a research article based on this work.

The search engine will guide the 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 common people to get deeper insights into scientific studies.

“A good initiative in the fight against COVID as such AI tools can help extract contextual insights from research articles,” said Dr.Saji Gopinath, CEO, Kerala Startup Mission and Director of IIITM-K.

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

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.