As information volume in enterprise systems and in the Web grows rapidly, how to accurately retrieve information is an important research area. Several corpus based smoothing techniques have been proposed to address the data sparsity and synonym problems faced by information retrieval systems. Such smoothing techniques are often unable to discover and utilize the correlations among terms.

Leximancer is a software system for performing conceptual analysis of text data in a largely language independent manner. The system is modelled on Content Analysis and provides unsupervised and supervised analysis using seeded concept classifiers. Unsupervised ontology discovery is a key component.

The Theory of Technology Dominance (Arnold & Sutton, 1998) proposes that the continued use of intelligent decision aids in the audit task has the effect of deskilling auditors over time. This research proposal presents a study that extends and validates this theoretical framework through an integrated conceptual model. The research question examined is ‘does the continued use of intelligent decision aids reduce the auditor’s skills in forming their professional judgment? ’ No prior research has explored deskilling of auditor judgment. The research is important for practice to ensure a strong audit profession, and contributes to theory through extension of the theoretical foundations of the deskilling effect. The theoretical extension is undertaken through an integration of cognitive load theory