Efficient browsing of digital libraries with the support of will‐be‐relevant information

Abstract

This paper discusses a method of efficient browsing in digital libraries arranged so that similar documents are placed close to each other. The basic idea is that some relevant documents exhibit a high similarity to the query, and some other relevant documents exhibit a high similarity to documents that the user has already judged to be relevant. Based on this idea, a general efficient browsing method is presented in which the system successively learns the results of relevance judgments by the user and suggests the relevance of the document to be examined in the following stage. A control procedure for browsing is derived in which the whole image of the document arrangement is revealed, while repeatedly performing browsing for various queries. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated experimentally through comparison to the conventional method using ranking lists. Considering its use on the Internet, a navigator for browsing has also been designed. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(4): 36–48, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (http://www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10080