Guided Exploratory Search on the Mobile Web

We present a mobile touchable application for guided exploration of web content and online topic graph extraction that has been successfully implemented on a tablet, i.e. an Apple iPad, and on a mobile device/phone, i.e. Apple iPhone or iPod. Starting from a user’s search query a set of web snippets is collected by a standard search engine in a first step. After that the snippets are collected into one document from which the topic graph is computed. This topic graph is presented to the user in different touchable and interactive graphical representations depending on the screensize of the mobile device. However due to possible semantic ambiguities in the search queries the snippets may cover different thematic areas and so the topic graph may contain associated topics for different semantic entities of the original query. This may lead the user to wrong directions while exploring the solution space. Hence we present our approach for an interactive disambiguation of the search query and so we provide assistance for the users towards a guided exploratory search.