Idea Navigation: Structured Browsing for Unstructured Text

Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 5-10, 2008

Traditional interfaces for information access do not fully support queries that rely on semantic relationships between terms. To better support such queries, we introduce a system that automatically extracts subject-verb-object concepts from unstructured text documents and dynamically presents them to the user as navigable refinements. This approach, which we call “idea navigation,” makes subject-verb-object querying as simple as selecting successive refinements. It also supports exploratory search by providing a view of the most common ideas in the current result set. First-time users of a prototype system successfully used idea navigation to solve realistic search tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Tableau-Autor(en)

Robin Stewart

Autor(en)

Gregory Scott, Vladimir Zelevinsky