Using NLP to build the hypertextuel network of a back-of-the-book index

Relying on the idea that back-of-the-book indexes are traditional devices for navigation through large documents, we have developed a method to build a hypertextual network that helps the navigation in a document. Building such an hypertextual network requires selecting a list of descriptors, identifying the relevant text segments to associate with each descriptor and finally ranking the descriptors and reference segments by relevance order. We propose a specific document segmentation method and a relevance measure for information ranking. The algorithms are tested on 4 corpora (of different types and domains) without human intervention or any semantic knowledge

An Empirical Study of User Navigation during Document Triage

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοDocument triage is the moment in the information seeking process when the user first decides the relevance of a document to their information need[17]. This paper reports a study of user behaviour during document triage. The study reveals two main findings: first, that there is a small set of common navigational patterns; second, that certain document features strongly influence users’ navigation

Touching Annotations: A Visual Metaphor for Navigation of Annotation in Digital Documents.

Direct touch manipulation interactions with technology are now commonplace and significant interest is building around their use in the culture and heritage domain. Such interactions can give people the opportunity to explore materials and artefacts in ways that would otherwise be unavailable. These are often heavily annotated and can be linked to a large array of related digital content, thus enriching the experience for the user. Research has addressed issues of how to present digital documents and their related annotations but at present it is unclear what the optimal interaction approach to navigating these annotations in a touch display context might be. In this paper we investigate the role of two alternative approaches to support the navigation of annotations in digitised documents in the context of a touch interface. Through a control study we demonstrate that, whilst the navigation paradigm displays a significant interaction with the type of annotations task performed, there is no discernible advantage of using a natural visual metaphor for annotation in this context. This suggests that design of digital document annotation navigation tools should account for the context and navigation tasks being considered

Theory and practice in visual interfaces for semi-structured document discovery and selection

With the increase in electronic publications, and indeed the availability of existing publications in digital form, as well as the encouragement of open access publication, comes a challenge. That challenge is to create assistive software to aid in the discovery and selection of relevant documents to one’s information need. Visual interfaces have begun to address the need of information seekers in finding publications and wading through the large result sets that are returned from search engines. There is currently, little evidence to suggest that these interfaces are based on systematic research on requirements. In this article, we examine areas which contribute to the theory and practice of visual interfaces directly relating to the discovery and selection of publications. We bring together work from different fields in a targeted approach to assist the future creation of these interfaces

Visualization of Co-authorshipin DIT Arrow

With the popularization of information technology and the unprecedented development of online reading, the management and service of the library are facing severe challenges; the traditional library operation mode has been challenging to optimize the service. At the same time, there is also a fatal impact on library collection and systematic management, however, with the development of visualization techniques in management and service, the library can alleviate the effect of the current network information basically, which achieves the intellectual development of library field. This study empirically provides the evidence to indicate that the force directed layout has the statistically significant performance than the radial layout for visualization of co-authorship in DIT Arrow repository based on the results of surveys

A Visual Enhancement for Metadata Generation Tools: A Semi-Automatic Approach via KWIC and Highlighting

This paper reports on a study that examined a visual enhancement for NC Health Info, an online health information portal for NC residents. The research goal was to improve the Health Topic assignment with a semi-automatic approach via KWIC and highlighting. The study had three components: a contextual inquiry investigating improvable areas; a prototype developed according to the contextual inquiry findings; and a comparative user study evaluating the effects of the proposed approach on the assignment of Health Topics and users' perceptions of two systems. The experiment results proved that the prototype significantly reduced the cataloging time and may potentially improve metadata quality. Additionally, measured users' perceptions of the proposed system were positive. This approach is expected not only to improve NC Health Info services but further enhance metadata generation tools in the future

Implementation and analysis of a direct multidisplay repository

When several information items are presented simultaneously, the potential exists for users to interact with information in a rich and rewarding way. The MultiBrowser system supports such interaction via an information foraging style of hypermedia browsing. Multiple windows, colored bars that provide visual cues, and automatically inserted hyperlinks among the paragraphs in a document set contribute to the structure of repositories created by MultiBrowser. These repositories are browsable over the Web using an ordinary Web browser.;Using these repositories as a platform, we investigate hypertext repositories with automatically generated hyperlinks among paragraphs. The algorithms that generate the links yield results with significant common characteristics despite large differences among the algorithms. Furthermore, different repositories generated from the return lists of different search engines show significant common characteristics. Finally, repositories generated for different domains also have common characteristics. This suggests that these characteristics are pervasive properties of judiciously retrieved document sets. The common characteristics revolve around a tendency for some documents (called the kernel) to be destinations of a disproportionately high fraction of the hyperlinks in the repository. An emergent property of such repositories with practical significance is that browsing activities will have a tendency to trap users within the kernel, perhaps without them realizing it. To enable users to choose to avoid being trapped, we propose a ring structure for hypertext repositories. This structure is exposed to the user by annotations to the hyperlinks

Using the organizational and narrative thread structures in an e-book to support comprehension.

Stories, themes, concepts and references are organized structurally and purposefully in most books. A person reading a book needs to understand themes and concepts within the context. Schanks Dynamic Memory theory suggested that building on existing memory structures is essential to cognition and learning. Pirolli and Card emphasized the need to provide people with an independent and improved ability to access and understand information in their information seeking activities. Through a review of users reading behaviours and of existing e-Book user interfaces, we found that current e-Book browsers provide minimal support for comprehending the content of large and complex books. Readers of an e-Book need user interfaces that present and relate the organizational and narrative structures, and moreover, reveal the thematic structures. This thesis addresses the problem of providing readers with effective scaffolding of multiple structures of an e-Book in the user interface to support reading for comprehension. Recognising a story or topic as the basic unit in a book, we developed novel story segmentation techniques for discovering narrative segments, and adapted story linking techniques for linking narrative threads in semi-structured linear texts of an e-Book. We then designed an e-Book user interface to present the complex structures of the e-Book, as well as to assist the reader to discover these structures. We designed and developed evaluation methodologies to investigate reading and comprehension in e-Books, in order to assess the effectiveness of this user interface. We designed semi-directed reading tasks using a Story-Theme Map, and a set of corresponding measurements for the answers. We conducted user evaluations with book readers. Participants were asked to read stories, to browse and link related stories, and to identify major themes of stories in an e-Book. This thesis reports the experimental design and results in detail. The results confirmed that the e-Book interface helped readers perform reading tasks more effectively. The most important and interesting finding is that the interface proved to be more helpful to novice readers who had little background knowledge of the book. In addition, each component that supported the user interface was evaluated separately in a laboratory setting and, these results too are reported in the thesis