Hierarchy Builder: Organizing Textual Spans into a Hierarchy to Facilitate Navigation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for organizing large sets of extracted textual information into a hierarchical structure, enhancing user navigation and exploration, demonstrated in the medical domain.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach to automatically build hierarchical DAG structures from extracted text, improving information exploration capabilities.

Findings

Effective grouping of similar strings achieved

Hierarchical structure improves navigation and overview

Applied successfully to medical information extraction

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.