A Combined Phrase and Thesaurus Browser for Large Document Collections

A hierarchical browsing interface to a document collection can be constructed by identifying the phrases that recur in the full text of the documents and structuring them into a hierarchy. 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, w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ERCIMDL
• Authors: Gordon W. Paynter, Ian H. Witten
• Keywords: Document Collections, Education, ERCIMDL 2001, Hierarchical Browsing Interface, Thesaurus