Pattern based browsing in document collections

We present Document Explorer, a data mining system searching for patterns in document collections. These patterns provide knowledge on the application domain that is represented by the collection. A pattern can also be seen as a query that retrieves a set of documents. Thus the data mining tools can be used to identify interesting queries which can be used to browse the collection. The main pattern types, the system can search for, are frequent sets of concepts, association rules, concept distributions, and concept graphs. To enable the user to specify some explicit bias, the system provides several types of constraints for searching the vast implicit spaces of patterns that exist in the collection. The patterns which have been verified as interesting are structured and presented in a visual user interface allowing the user to operate on the results to refine and redirect search tasks or to access the associated documents. The system offers preprocessing tools to construct or refine a knowledge base of domain concepts and to create an internal representation of the document collection that will be used by all subsequent data mining operations. In this paper, we give an overview on the Document Explorer system. We summarize our methodical approaches and solutions for the special requirements of this document mining area.