Information retrieval through hybrid navigation of lattice representations

In this paper we present a comprehensive approach to automatic organization and hybrid navigation of text databases. An organizing stage first builds a particular lattice representation of the data, through text indexing followed by lattice clustering of the indexed texts. The lattice representation, then, supports the navigation stage of the system, a visual retrieval interface that combines three main retrieval strategies: browsing, querying, and bounding. Browsing and querying are used to search the retrieval space, bounding is used to restrict it based on the information that users have, or get during their interaction with the system. We show that such a hybrid paradigm permits high flexibility in trading off information exploration and retrieval and, in addition, has good retrieval performance. We compared information retrieval using lattice-based hybrid navigation with conventional Boolean querying. The results of an experiment conducted on two medium-sized bibliographic databases showed that the performance of lattice retrieval was comparable to or better than Boolean retrieval.