Related Information Discovery Using Enumerations in Wikipedia Articles for Supporting Multidimensional Understanding of Search Target

Abstract

In an exploratory search where a user is likely to be unsure about the goal of her/his search, thus needs to clarify the goal through trial and error, it is important to support the user’s understanding of “what she/he is trying to find out” (search target). In order to deepen the understanding of the target in the search process, it is necessary for the user not only to obtain more detailed information by so-called narrowing down but also to grasp the relationship with other concepts and to understand various aspects of the target concept. In this paper, we propose a method of discovering relevant information for suppoting multidimensional understanding of the target concept. The enumerations in Wikipedia articles such as tables and lists are used to find the information. We conducted a user experiment for verifying usefulness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can find a larger amount of useful information compared to other methods including query recommendation of search engines. It is also shown that the proportion of useful information among related information found by the proposed method exceeds 70%.