Explanatory semantic relatedness and explicit spatialization for exploratory search

  • Authors:

  • Brent Hecht;Samuel H. Carton;Mahmood Quaderi;Johannes Schöning;Martin Raubal;Darren Gergle;Doug Downey

  • Affiliations:

  • Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;Independent Researcher, Aachen, Germany;ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

  • Venue:
  • SIGIR '12 Proceedings of the 35th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Exploratory search, in which a user investigates complex concepts, is cumbersome with today's search engines. We present a new exploratory search approach that generates interactive visualizations of query concepts using thematic cartography (e.g. choropleth maps, heat maps). We show how the approach can be applied broadly across both geographic and non-geographic contexts through explicit spatialization, a novel method that leverages any figure or diagram -- from a periodic table, to a parliamentary seating chart, to a world map -- as a spatial search environment. We enable this capability by introducing explanatory semantic relatedness measures. These measures extend frequently-used semantic relatedness measures to not only estimate the degree of relatedness between two concepts, but also generate human-readable explanations for their estimates by mining Wikipedia's text, hyperlinks, and category structure. We implement our approach in a system called Atlasify, evaluate its key components, and present several use cases.