Athens: A system for novel information discovery.

摘要

The serendipitous discovery of novel information in information repositories such as the Web is a challenging task. Existing retrieval tools, like search engines, can retrieve information about known topics. However, they cannot retrieve information about novel topics, that is topics whose existence is unknown to the user and which may be potentially interesting.; In this thesis, we propose Athens1, a system for discovering novel information in the Web. Athens retrieves novel information through a focused search. It comprises three fundamental components: closure to find the essential content of a set of search query terms; probe to create new contextualized queries for retrieving information of wider scope; and cluster to remove less relevant information. Given a set of initial query terms, the system repeats these steps twice to reach novel information relative to the initial query topic.; The Athens system is tested using several search queries and the results are qualitatively validated. The experimental results indicate that the system retrieves novel information regarding a broad array of topics that possess a high degree of relevance to the initial query topic. The results also demonstrate that the novel information retrieved shares a strong correlation with the query topic.; 1Bible, Acts 17:21: More than anything else, the people of Athens and the foreigners living there loved to hear and to talk about anything new.