A combined phrase and thesaurus browser for large document collections

Abstract

A browsing interface to a document collection can be constructed automatically by identifying the phrases that recur in the full text of the documents and structuring them into a hierarchy based on lexical inclusion. This provides a good way of allowing readers to browse comfortably through the phrases (all phrases) in a large document collection. A subject-oriented thesaurus provides a different kind of hierarchical structure, based on deep knowledge of the subject area. If all documents, or parts of documents, are tagged with thesaurus terms, this provides a very convenient way of browsing through a collection. Unfortunately, manual classification is expensive and infeasible for many practical document collections. This paper describes a browsing scheme that gives the best of both worlds by providing a phrase-oriented browser and a thesaurus browser within the same interface. Users can switch smoothly between the phrases in the collection, which give access to the actual documents, and the thesaurus entries, which suggest new relationships and new terms to seek.