Choosing your own adventure: automatic taxonomy generation to permit many paths

A taxonomy organizes concepts or topics in a hierarchical structure and can be created manually or via automated systems. A major drawback of taxonomies is that they require users to have the same view of the topics as the taxonomy creator. Users who do not share that mental taxonomy are likely to have difficulty in finding the desired topic. In this paper, we propose a new approach to taxonomy expansion which is able to provide more flexible views. Based on an existing taxonomy, our algorithm finds possible alternative paths and generates an expanded taxonomy with flexibility in user browsing choices. In experiments on the dmoz Open Directory Project, the rebuilt taxonomies provide more alternative paths and shorter paths to information. User studies show that our expanded taxonomies are preferred compared to the original. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval—Information filtering; I.5.2 [Pattern Recog...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Xiaoguang Qi, Dawei Yin, Zhenzhen Xue, Brian D. Davison
• Keywords: Alternative Paths, CIKM 2010, Information Technology, Taxonomies, Taxonomy