Phrasier: a system for interactive document retrieval using keyphrases

Jones, S., Staveley, M. S. (1999) Proc 22nd International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR’99),edited by M. Hearst, F. Gey and R. Tong, Berkeley, USA, August, pp 160-167. ACM.

Users’ information needs are often too complex to be effectively expressed in standard query interfaces to full-text retrieval systems. A typical need is to find documents that are similar to a given source document, yet describing the content of a document in a few terms is a difficult task. We describe Phrasier, an interactive system for browsing, querying and relating documents within a digital library. Phrasier exploits keyphrases that have been automatically extracted from source documents to create links to similar document and to suggest appropriate query phrases to users. Phrasier’s keyphrase-based retrieval engine returns ranked lists of documents that are similar to a given source text. Evaluation indicates that Phrasier’s keyphrase-based retrieval performs as well as full-text retrieval when recall and relevance scores assigned by human assessors are considered.