Toward an outsider agent for supporting a brainstorming session ---
an information retrieval method from a different viewpoint
Conflicts among different concepts are often useful in creating new
ideas. Therefore, an outsider's attendance at a brainstorming session
is often effective for activating a brainwave. Our research goal is to
construct an artificial outsider agent. As the first step toward the
goal, we propose an outsider model as an information retrieval model
for obtaining information that has not only evident relevance but also
hidden relevance for users. A prototype system has been
constructed. Subjective experiments using the prototype system and a
detailed analysis of the results confirm that the outsider model can
extract such information. Furthermore, we propose a method to combine
plural domains of knowledge. It is expected that the combining method
can generate new relevance that could not be obtained by using the
knowledge domains individually.