Corpora: Workshop on The Technology of Browsing Applications

[Nina Wacholder]

*********************CALL FOR PARTICIPATION***************

THE TECHNOLOGY OF BROWSING APPLICATIONS

Roanoke, Virginia
June 28, 2001

Workshop in conjunction with the 2001 Joint Conference on Digital
Libraries: http://www.jcdl.org/

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I. Workshop Description

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the technology of phrase
browsing applications, an approach for providing information seekers with
access to text content via structured lists of index terms. Browsing
applications provide users with a preview of the content of a collection
of documents or of a single document. The index terms, which may be
identified by a variety of techniques, are phrases that represent
important concepts referred to in a document or collection of documents.
The browsing system supports interactive navigation and organization of
the phrases.

Browsing systems are distinct from systems based on ontologies because
phrases are drawn automatically from the text of the collection itself,
and do not necessarily correspond to taxonomies of the collection content.
For this reason, phrase-browsing systems can be easily integrated with
full-text search.

Issues related to the identification of terms and the development of
browsing applications, sometimes called phrase browsing, have been
discussed in the digital library, information retrieval, and natural
language processing communities (for example, Nevill-Manning et al. 1997;
Anick and Tipirneni 1999; Wacholder et al. 2000). The usability of
electronic indexes has also been investigated, for example, by Milstead
1994 and by Hert et al. 2000.

To the best of our knowledge there has not yet been a forum that has
brought researchers from different fields together to discuss browsing
applications, especially identification of index terms, techniques for
hierarchical organization of terms, implementation of efficient systems,
usability of browsing applications, and techniques for evaluating these
systems. JCDL 2001 provides an excellent venue for doing this.

II. PROGRAM

9:00   Welcome. Nina Wacholder, Columbia University, and Craig
Nevill-Manning, Rutgers University

9:10   Phrase Hierarchy Inference. Gordon Paynter, University of Waikato,
Craig Nevill-Manning, Rutgers University, and Ian Witten, University of
Waikato

9:35   The Technology of Lexical Navigation.  James Cooper, IBM T.J.
Watson Research Center

10:00   A Combined Phrase and Thesaurus Browser for Large Document
Collections. Gordon Paynter, University of Waikato, and Ian Witten,
University of Waikato

10:25   5 minute stretch

10:30   Using Keyphrases to Support Flexible Reading of On-line Documents.
Steve Jones, University of Waikato

10:45   The Intell-Index System: Using NLP Techniques to Organize a
Dynamic Text Browser. Nina Wacholder, Columbia University

11:00   Break

11:20 Building Efficient and Effective Phrase Browsers: Technological, NLP
and Usability Challenges.  PANELISTS: Judith Klavans, Columbia University,
Elizabeth Liddy, Syracuse University, and Craig Nevill-Manning, Rutgers
University

12:15   Open Discussion

1:00     Workshop ends

Box lunches will be provided at the end of the workshop.

To register for the Browsing Technology workshop, visit the JCDL '01 Home
Page: http://www.jcdl.org/

For more information, contact Nina Wacholder (nina at cs.columbia.edu) or
Craig Nevill-Manning (craig at nevill-manning.com)