Semantics-Empowered Text Exploration for Knowledge Discovery

The interaction paradigm offered by most contemporary Web Information Systems is a search-and-sift paradigm in which users manually seek information using hyperlinked documents. This paradigm is derived from a document-centric model that gives users minimal support for scanning through high volumes of text. We present a novel information exploration paradigm based on a data-centric view of corpora, along with a prototype implementation that demonstrates the value in content-driven navigation. We leverage semantic metadata to link data in documents by exploiting named relationships between entities. We also present utilities for gathering user generated navigation trails, critical for knowledge discovery. We discuss the impact of our approach in the context of knowledge exploration.