Texplore - Exploring Expository Texts Via Hierarchical Representation

Exploring expository texts presents an interesting and important challenge. They are read routinely and extensively in the form of online newspapers, web-based articles, reports, technical and academic papers. We present a system, called Texplore, which assists readers in exploring the content of expository texts. The system provides two mechanisms for text exploration, an expandable outline that represents the hierarchical structure of the text, and a concept index, hot-linked to the concept references in the text. The hierarchical structure is discovered using lexical cohesion methods combined with hierarchical agglomerative clustering. The list of concepts are discovered by n-gram analysis filtered by part-of-speech patterns. Rather than the common presentation of documents by static abstracts, Texplore provides dynamic presentation of the text's content, where the user controls the level of detail.q. 1 Introduction Ever-faster computers, the Internet together with large information repositories linked by high-speed networks, are combined to provide immediate accessibility to large amounts of texts. The urgency of exploring these texts varies depending on the consumer-students, researchers, professionals, decision makers, or just anybody. In any case the amounts of texts are beyond our ability to digest them. Research in information retrieval (IR) has been focused until now on the task of presenting relevant documents to the user. Commercial tools followed suit, as evident by the many powerful search engines now available on the Web. Typically, the relevant doo,ments are presented by some automatically computed abstract. Our work focuses on medium size and longer