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<Paper uid="W98-0204">
  <Title>Texplore exploring expository texts via hierarchical representation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Ever-faster computers, the Internet together with large information repositories linked by high-speed networks, are combined to provide immediate accessibility to large amounts of texts. The urgency of exploring these texts varies depending on the consumer - students, researchers, professionals, decision makers, or just anybody. In any case the amounts of texts are beyond our ability to digest them.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Research in information retrieval (IR) has been focused until now on the task of presenting relevant documents to the user. Commercial tools followed suit, as evident by the many powerful search engines now available on the Web.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Typically, the relevant doo,ments are presented by some automatically computed abstract.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Our work focuses on medium size and longer documents where the user needs some further assistance in exploring the content of the retrieved document. The idea then is to extend the applicability of IR methods, beyond the document retrieval, to the task of a reading assistant. null We might expect from a reading assistant, or a text exploration tool, to provide us with two basic capabilities:  1. A controlled view of the content of the document. null 2. The list of concepts discussed in the text.  The first capability might be seen as an &amp;quot;electronic&amp;quot; table-of-contents, and is the key vehicle for efficient text exploration. The second can be seen as an &amp;quot;electronic&amp;quot; index, and provides an orthogonal access vehicle to the mechanism of a table-of-contents.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We have implemented such a text exploration system in Texplore. It is designed for expository texts such as informative articles in magazines, technical reports and scientific papers. In Section 2 we discuss some characteristics of expository texts that make possible the development of the above text exploration capabilities. In Section 3 we focus on the importance of hierarchical representation of texts as a visualization tool. Section 4 details the Texplore system itself, ag~dn focusing on the hierarchical content representation. We conclude by discussing some shortcoming of the system and p\]an.q for improvements.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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