This paper introduces a novel user interface that integrates search and browsing of very large category hierarchies with their associated text collections. A key component is the separate but simultaneous display of the representations of the categories and the retrieved documents. Another key component is the display ofmultiple selected categories simultaneously, complete with their hierarchical context. The prototype implementation uses animation and a three-dimensional graphical workspace to accommodate the category hierarchy and to store intermediate search results. Query specification in this 3D environment is accomplished via a novel method for painting Boolean queries over a combination of category labels and free text. Examples are shown on a collection of medical text.

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The recent advances in Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) together with the major changes faced by modern Information Retrieval (IR) provide new unprecedented challenges and opportunities for FCA-based IR applications. The main advantage of FCA for IR is the possibility of creating a conceptual representation of a given document collection in the form of a document lattice, which may be used both to improve the retrieval of specific items and to drive the mining of the collection’s contents. In this paper, we will examine the best features of FCA for solving IR tasks that could not be easily addressed by conventional systems, as well as the most critical aspects for building FCA-based IR applications. These observations have led to the development of CREDO, a system that allows the user to query Web documents and see retrieval results organized in a browsable concept lattice. This is the second major focus of the paper. We will show that CREDO is especially useful for quickly locating the documents corresponding to the meaning of interest among those retrieved in response to an ambiguous query, or for mining the contents of the documents that reference a given entity. An on-line version of the system is available for testing at

Current best-match ranking (BMR) systems perform well but cannot handle word mismatch between a query and a document. The best known alternative ranking method, hierarchical clustering-based ranking (HCR), seems to be more robust than BMR with respect to this problem, but it is hampered by theoretical and practical limitations. We present an approach to document ranking that explicitly addresses the word mismatch problem by exploiting interdocument similarity information in a novel way. Document ranking is seen as a querydocument transformation driven by a conceptual representation of the whole document collection, into which the query is merged. Our approach is based on the theory of concept (or Galois) lattices, which, we argue, provides a powerful, well-founded, and computationallytractable framework to model the space in which documents and query are represented and to compute such a transformation. We compared information retrieval using concept lattice-based ranking (CLR) to BMR and HCR. The results showed that HCR was outperformed by CLR as well as by BMR, and suggested that, of the two best methods, BMR achieved better performance than CLR on the whole document set while CLR compared more favorably when only the first retrieved documents were used for evaluation. We also evaluated the three methods' specific ability to rank documents that did not match the query, in which case the superiority of CLR over BMR and HCR (and that of HCR over BMR) was apparent.

Abstract. An important problem for information access systems is that of organizing large sets of documents that have been retrieved in response to a query. Text categorization and text clustering are two natural language processing tasks whose results can be applied to document organization. This chapter describes user interfaces that use categories and clusters to organize retrieval results, and examines the relationship between the two. 1 1.

Abstract. Domain-specific information retrieval normally depends on general search engines, or systems which support browsing using handcrafted organisation of documents, but such systems are costly to build and maintain. An alternative approach for specialised domains is to build a retrieval system incrementally and dynamically by allowing users to evolve their own organisation of documents and to assist them in ensuring improvement of the system’s performance as it evolves. This paper describes a browsing mechanism for such a system based on the concept lattice of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) in cooperation with incremental knowledge acquisition mechanisms. Our experience with a prototype suggests that a browsing scheme for a specific domain can be able to be collaboratively created and maintained by multiple users over time. It also appears that the concept lattice of FCA is a useful way of supporting the flexible open management of documents required by individuals, small communities or in specialised domains. 1

We present a user interface, the OntoRefiner system, for helping the user to navigate numerous retrieved documents after a search querying a semantic portal which integrates a very important number of documents. Retrieved answers are filtered and the user could be provided only with the answers which are, according to him, the most relevant. The refinement process is based on two technologies, dynamic clustering close to Galois lattice structure combined to the use of a domain ontology. The Galois lattice structure provides a sound basis for the query refinement process. However, its construction as a whole is a very costly process. So, we propose an approach based on the use of a domain ontology, avoiding the construction of the whole Galois lattice. In the paper, we present the algorithm and experimental results.

Abstract. Concept lattices assist human understanding in three ways: firstly, by collecting formal concepts that contain maximal sets of objects with shared attributes; secondly, the relatedness of concepts is revealed by providing a hierarchy of formal concepts in the information space. Finally, the concept lattice (drawn as a line diagram) reveals inferences that can automatically derive association rules. Therefore, a major hypothesis of the application of concept lattices is that they visually assist in understanding the structure of information contained within an information space. However, there has been little in the way of empirical tests to substantiate this hypothesis. This paper describes the process and results of a usability evaluation for a program called Mail-Strainer, a Web-based variant of the Mail-Sleuth program, which in turn is based on the Conceptual Email Manager (Cem). 1

Perusal of textual displays of document surrogates produced by Web-based rankedoutput retrieval services may require much user time, effort, and money. In this paper we present VIEWER, a graphical interface that allows visualization and manipulation of views of retrieval results, where a view is the subset of retrieved surrogates that contain a specified subset of query terms. We argue that VIEWER helps the user focus on relevant parts of the results and, in addition, it may facilitate query reformulation. We present the results of an experiment performed by six subjects on two medium size bibliographical test collections in which VIEWER, used as an interactive ranking systems, outperformed both best match ranking and coordination level-based ranking.

We present an approach to increasing the effectiveness of ranked-output retrieval systems that relies on graphical display and user manipulation of "views" of retrieval results, where a view is the subset of retrieved documents that contain a specified subset of query terms. This approach has been implemented in a system named VIEWER (VIEwing WEb Results), acting as an interface to available search engines. An experimental evaluation of the performance of VIEWER in contrast to AltaVista is the major focus of the paper. We first report the results of an experiment on single, short query searches where VIEWER, used as an interactive ranking system, markedly outperformed AltaVista. We then concentrate on a more realistic searching scenario, involving free query formulation, unconstrained selection of retrieval results, and possibility of query reformulation. We report the results of an experiment where the use of VIEWER, compared to AltaVista, seemed to shift the user effort from inspection to evaluation of results, increasing retrieval effectiveness and user satisfaction. In particular, we found that the VIEWER users retrieved half as many nonrelevant documents as the AltaVista users while retrieving a comparable number of relevant documents.