When people search for information about a new topic within large document collections, they implicitly construct a mental model of the unfamiliar information space to represent what they currently know and guide their exploration into the unknown. Building this mental model can be challenging as it requires not only finding relevant documents, but also synthesizing important concepts and the relationships that connect those concepts both within and across documents. This paper describes a novel interactive approach designed to help users construct a mental model of an unfamiliar information space during exploratory search. We propose a new semantic search system to organize and visualize important concepts and their relations for a set of search results. A user study ($n=20$) was conducted to compare the proposed approach against a baseline faceted search system on exploratory literature search tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is more effective in helping users recognize relationships between key concepts, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of the search topic while maintaining similar functionality and usability as a faceted search system.

翻译：当人们在大型文档集合中搜索新主题的信息时，会隐式构建陌生信息空间的心智模型，以表征当前所知并指导对未知领域的探索。构建这一心智模型具有挑战性，因为它不仅需要发现相关文档，还需要综合关键概念及其在文档内部和跨文档间的关联关系。本文描述了一种新颖的交互式方法，旨在帮助用户在探索性搜索过程中构建陌生信息空间的心智模型。我们提出了一种新的语义搜索系统，用于组织并可视化搜索结果集合中的重要概念及其关联关系。通过一项用户研究（$n=20$），将所提方法与基准分面搜索系统在探索性文献搜索任务上进行了对比。实验结果表明，所提方法能更有效地帮助用户识别关键概念间的关联，从而在保持与分面搜索系统相似功能与可用性的同时，促进用户对搜索主题形成更深入的理解。