Use of Visualization to Assist the User with Term Selection for Query Expansion

Information is the most abundant resource in the modern world. The amount of information available to the general public has grown tremendously. Unfortunately methods of searching through this abundance of information have not kept pace. Visualization systems have been developed to display large amounts of information in an intuitive and space-efficient manner. In this paper we describe an intuitive user interface for identifying closely related terms. Many existing visualization systems are too complicated and require an expert user. We have focused our design specifically on casual searchers, i.e. those without formal training in library science or information retrieval