Towards Topic Driven Access to Full Text Documents

The approach to segmentation is described, issues related to evaluation, and results are reported on, which show small and coherent documents that can be used in two ways: as a basis for automatically generating hypertext links, and as a visualization aid for the reader who is presented with a small set of focused and restricted text snippets.

Abstract

We address the issue of providing topic driven access to full text documents. The methodology we propose is a combination of topic segmentation and information retrieval techniques. By segmenting the text into topic driven segments, we obtain small and coherent documents that can be used in two ways: as a basis for automatically generating hypertext links, and as a visualization aid for the reader who is presented with a small set of focused and restricted text snippets. In the presence of a concept hierarchy, or ontology, information retrieval techniques can be used to connect the segments obtained to concepts in the ontology. In this paper we concentrate on the text segmentation phase: we describe our approach to segmentation, discuss issues related to evaluation, and report on preliminary results.