Constructing Task-Specific Taxonomies for Document Collection Browsing

Taxonomies can serve as browsing tools for document collections. However, given an arbitrary collection, pre-constructed taxonomies could not easily adapt to the specific topic/task present in the collection. This paper explores techniques to quickly derive task-specific taxonomies supporting browsing in arbitrary document collections. The supervised approach directly learns semantic distances from users to propose meaningful task-specific taxonomies. The approach aims to produce globally optimized taxonomy structures by incorporating path consistency control and usergenerated task specification into the general learning framework. A comparison to stateof-the-art systems and a user study jointly demonstrate that our techniques are highly effective.