Development of the user interface for Exploratory Search using the SOM

Abstract

The important thing in Exploratory Search is that a retrieving person clarifies the goal of search. For that purpose, first it is required to find the keyword which related to Search-word. Then, a retrieving person finds the related keyword that he is interested in. However, since the information acquired by search is huge, it is difficult to find the keyword which fulfills conditions from the information. Then, I thought that such a problem was solvable by developing the tool which extracts only required information from search results and displays the clustered result. In order to make a clustering result intelligible visually, a selforganization map is used, and information is arranged and displayed on a two-dimensional map. Moreover, in order to be able to reflect a user's idea in a clustering result, it enables it to change freely the parameter of the feature vector used by SOM. Finally, evaluating the usefulness of this tool by experiment.