A Directed Concept Search Environment to Visually Explore Texts Related to User-defined Concept Models

摘要

We introduce a concept search environment that caters for the needs of humanities scholars who want to improve the accuracy of search results when querying historical text corpora. For this purpose, we designed a so-called Concept Editor that allows to model historical concepts in a diagram style according to the imag-inations of the humanities scholar. For the inspection of results determined in the proposed concept search, we provide a Concept Search Results Viewer that uses the existent layout of the underlying concept model to visualize related texts according to the relevance to the given concept. We further designed the overall system the way that the humanities scholar can iteratively refine the concept idea, which leads to a gradual improvement of search results. To illustrate the whole development pipeline, we provide a usage scenario on modeling the concept epilepsy with the purpose of improving the accuracy of results compared to usual applied keyword-based search methods.