Abstract: Iterative information retrieval from a large database of textual or text-containing documents is facilitated by automatic construction of faceted representations. Facets are chosen heuristically based on lexical dispersion, a measure of the number of different words with which a particular search expression co-occurs within a given type of lexical construct (e.g., a noun phrase) appearing in the document set. Words having high dispersion rates represent “facets” that may be used to organize the documents conceptually in accordance with the search expression, effectively providing a concise, structured summary of the contents of a result set as well as presenting a set of candidate terms for query reformulation.

Abstract: Iterative information retrieval from a large database of textual or text-containing documents is facilitated by automatic construction of faceted representations. Facets are chosen heuristically based on lexical dispersion, a measure of the number of different words with which a particular search expression co-occurs within a given type of lexical construct (e.g., a noun phrase) appearing in the document set. Words having high dispersion rates represent “facets” that may be used to organize the documents conceptually in accordance with the search expression, effectively providing a concise, structured summary of the contents of a result set as well as presenting a set of candidate terms for query reformulation.