Lexical navigation: visually prompted query expansion and refinement

We have designed a document search and retrieval system, termed Lexical Navigation, which provides an interface allowing a user to expand or refine a query based on the actual content of the collection. In this work we have designed a client-server system written in Java to allow users to issue queries, have additional terms suggested to them, explore lexical relationships, and view documents based on keywords they contain. Lexical networks containing domain-specific vocabularies and relationships are automatically extracted from the collection and play an important role in this navigation process. The Lexical Navigation methodology constitutes a powerful set of tools for searching large text collections.