Dynamic content organization in information retrieval systems

Abstract

An information system and method provide organizational and navigational aids to a user to facilitate exploration and analysis of a document collection. The system includes a document collection containing a plurality of documents, and a knowledge base containing a plurality of topics. Each topic expresses an idea or concept, and is associated with a set of terms which describe the topic, a set of documents in the document collection which are about the topic. Each topic also has topic-subtopic relationships with selected other topics, forming local topic hierarchies. A query analysis module receives a current query and processes the query against the document collection to select a set of documents that satisfy the query. A dynamic content organization module processes the document set according to defined parameters and a user selection or automatic selection of a desired topic arrangement to create various types of topic arrangements. These topic arrangements include supertopics, subtopics, perspective topic, and theme topic arrangements. A supertopic arrangement is a set of parent topics of a topic derived from the query, which parent topics best generalize the document set. A subtopic arrangement is a set of subtopics of a topic derived from the query which best cover and partition the document set. A perspective topic arrangement has perspective topics, each of is a parent topic of a set of subtopics that cover and partition the document set. A theme topic arrangement has theme topics, each of which expresses a major subject or concept that describes the document set and distinguishes it from the rest of the document collection.