Okan Kolak

Generating links by mining quotations

Scanning books, magazines, and newspapers has become a widespread activity because people believe that much of the worlds information still resides off-line. In general after works are scanned they are indexed for search and processed to add links. This paper describes a new approach to automatically add links by mining popularly quoted passages. Our technique connects elements that are semantically rich, so strong relations are made. Moreover, link targets point within a work, facilitating navigation. This paper makes three contributions. We describe a scalable algorithm for mining repeated word sequences from extremely large text corpora. Second, we present techniques that filter and rank the repeated sequences for quotations. Third, we present a new user interface for navigating across and within works in the collection using quotation links. Our system has been run on a digital library of over 1 million books and has been used by thousands of people.

Exploring a digital library through key ideas

Key Ideas is a technique for exploring digital libraries by navigating passages that repeat across multiple books. From these popular passages emerge quotations that authors have copied from book to book because they capture an idea particularly well: Jefferson on liberty; Stanton on womens rights; and Gibson on cyberpunk. We augment Popular Passages by extracting key terms from the surrounding context and computing sets of related key terms. We then create an interaction model where readers fluidly explore the library by viewing popular quotations on a particular key term, and follow links to quotations on related key terms. In this paper we describe our vision and motivation for Key Ideas, present an implementation running over a massive, real-world digital library consisting of over a million scanned books, and describe some of the technical and design challenges. The principal contribution of this paper is the interaction model and prototype system for browsing digital libraries of books using key terms extracted from the aggregate context of popularly quoted passages.