connecting topics in document collections with stepping stones and pathways
In this paper, we present Stepping Stones and Pathways (SSP), an alternative model of building and presenting answers for the cases when queries on document collections cannot be answered just by a ranked list. Stepping Stones can handle questions like: "What is the relation of topics X and Y?" SSP addresses when the contents of a small set of related documents is needed as an answer rather than a single document, or when "query splitting" is required to satisfactorily explore a document space. Query results are networks of document groups representing topics, each group relating to and connecting (by documents) to other groups in the network. Thus, a network answers the user's information need. We devise new and more effective representations and techniques to visualize such answers, and to involve users as part of the answer-finding process. In order to verify the validity of our approach, and since the questions we aim to answer involve multiple topics, we performed a study involving a custom built broad collection of operating systems research papers, and evaluated the results with interested computer science students, using multiple measures.
documentation collect stepping stones pathways paper present model queries queries relation contention query splitting exploration space network group user user information need effect visualization process order validation custom operating system research computer science student measurement users cluster labeling suffix-tree clustering collection building from syllabi query