Retrieval, visualization and validation of affinities between documents

Abstract

We present an Information Retrieval tool that facilitates the task of the user when searching for a particular information that is of interest to him. Our system processes a given set of documents to produce a graph, where nodes represent documents and links the similarities. The aim is to offer the user a tool to navigate in this space in an easy way. It is possible to collapse/expand nodes. Our case study shows affinity groups based on the similarities of text production of researchers. This goes beyond the already established communities revealed by co-authorship. The system characterizes the activity of each author by a set of automatically generated keywords and by membership to a particular affinity group. The importance of each author is highlighted visually by the size of the node corresponding to the number of publications and different measures of centrality. Regarding the validation of the method, we analyse the impact of using different combinations of titles, abstracts and keywords on capturing the similarity between researchers.