A language modelling approach to relevance profiling for document browsing
David J. Harper, Sara Coulthard, Yixing Sun · 2002
This paper describes a novel tool, SmartSkim, for content-based browsing or skimming of documents. The tool integrates concepts from passage retrieval and from interfaces, such as TileBars, which provide a compact overview of query term hits within a document. We base our tool on the concept of relevance profiling, in which a plot of retrieval status values at each word position of a document is generated. A major contribution of this paper is applying language modelling to the task of relevance profiling. We describe in detail the design of the SmartSkim tool, and provide a critique of the design. Possible applications of the tool are described, and we consider how an operational version of SmartSkim might be designed.