Using self-organizing maps to organize document archives and to characterize subject matter: How to make a map tell the news of the world

Abstract

While the focus of research concerning electronic document archives still is on information retrieval, the importance of interactive exploration has been realized and is gaining importance. The map metaphor, where documents are organized on a map according to their contents, has proven particularly useful as an interface to such a collection. The self-organizing map has shown to produce stable topically ordered organizations of documents on such a 2-dimensional map display. However, the characteristics of these topical clusters are not being made explicit. In this paper we present the LabelSOM method which takes the applicability of the self-organizing map for document archive organization one step further by automatically labeling the various topical clusters found in the map. This allows the user to get an instant overview of the various topics covered by a document collection.