TopicViz: Semantic Navigation of Document Collections

When people explore and manage information, they think in terms of topics and themes. However, the software that supports information exploration sees text at only the surface level. In this paper we show how topic modeling -- a technique for identifying latent themes across large collections of documents -- can support semantic exploration. We present TopicViz, an interactive environment for information exploration. TopicViz combines traditional search and citation-graph functionality with a range of novel interactive visualizations, centered around a force-directed layout that links documents to the latent themes discovered by the topic model. We describe several use scenarios in which TopicViz supports rapid sensemaking on large document collections

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Onebox: Free-Text Interfaces as an Alternative to Complex Web Forms

This paper investigates the problem of translating free-text\ud queries into key-value pairs as an alternative means for searching `behind' web forms. We introduce a novel specication language for specifying free-text interfaces, and report the results of a user study where we evaluated our prototype in a travel planner scenario. Our results show that users prefer this free-text interface over the original web form and that they are about 9% faster on average at completing their search tasks