BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
          ID:: STAN//CS-TR-00-1630
       ENTRY:: April 14, 2000
ORGANIZATION:: Stanford University, Department of Computer Science
       TITLE:: Dynamic Categorization: A Method for Decreasing Information
               Overload
        TYPE:: Thesis
        TYPE:: Technical Report
      AUTHOR:: Pratt, Wanda
        DATE:: April 2000
       PAGES:: 194
    ABSTRACT:: When people use computer-based tools to find answers to
               general questions, they often are faced with a daunting list
               of search results that are returned by the search engine.
               Many search tools address this problem by helping users to
               make their searches more specific. However, when dozens or
               hundreds of documents are relevant to their question, users
               need tools that help them to explore and to understand their
               search results, rather than ones that eliminate a portion of
               those results. I have developed a new approach, called
               dynamic categorization, that addresses this prob-lem by
               automatically organizing search results into meaningful
               groups that correspond to the user's query. This approach
               uses knowledge of important kinds of queries and a model of
               the domain terminology to generate a hierarchical
               categorization of search results. I implemented this approach
               for the domain of medicine, where the amount of information
               in the primary medical literature alone is overwhelming.
               Results from my evaluation show that a tool based on this
               approach helps users to find answers to those important kinds
               of questions more quickly and easily than when they use a
               relevance-ranking system or a clustering system.
       NOTES:: [Adminitrivia V1/Prg/20000414]
         END:: STAN//CS-TR-00-1630