Hierarchy builder: Organizing textual spans into a hierarchy to facilitate navigation

Abstract

Information extraction systems often produce hundreds to thousands of strings on a specific topic. We present a method that facilitates better consumption of these strings, in an exploratory setting in which a user wants to both get a broad overview of what s available, and a chance to dive deeper on some aspects. The system works by grouping similar items together, and arranging the remaining items into a hierarchical navigable DAG structure. We apply the method to medical information extraction.