A LATTICE CONCEPTUAL CLUSTERING SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION TO BROWSING RETRIEVAL

The theory of concept (or Galois) lattices provides a simple and forma l approach to conceptual clustering. In this paper we present GALOIS, a system that automates and applies this theory. The algorithm utilize d by GALOIS to build a concept lattice is incremental and efficient, e ach update being done in time at most quadratic in the number of objec ts in the lattice. Also, the algorithm may incorporate background info rmation into the lattice, and through clustering, extend the scope of the theory. The application we present is concerned with information r etrieval via browsing, for which we argue that concept lattices may re present major support structures. We describe a prototype user interfa ce for browsing through the concept lattice of a document-term relatio n, possibly enriched with a thesaurus of terms. An experimental evalua tion of the system performed on a medium-sized bibliographic database shows good retrieval performance and a significant improvement after t he introduction of background knowledge.