The NTAP project is developing methods and tools to detect, analyse and visualize the distribution, flow and development of knowledge and opinions across online social networks. This is a collaboration between the Department of Information Science and Media Science at the University of Bergen and Uni Computing, a department in Uni Research (a university-owned research company); the project has several international and industrial partners. NTAP is funded by the Norwegian Research Council, VERDIKT program, and runs from January 2012 – July 2015.

NTAP tools will:

• help general users assess and interpret information in the blogosphere, and hence to better participate in online debate and decision making;
• enable social science researchers to  visualize and  analyse large data sets for investigating phenomena such information diffusion and polarization;
• allow media monitoring companies to better understand how statements and opinions are spread through social media.

Underlying research challenges relate to:

• generating semi-structured representations of statements across domains and languages (information extraction, natural language processing);
• identifying and relating different forms of the same statement, and contradictory statements (paraphrase detection, entailment, natural language processing);
• integrating computational techniques into research methods to investigate social networks with large data sets (social network analysis, media studies, computer science);
• designing information visualizations that enable interaction with large-scale and complex discursive landscapes (information visualization).