Self-Organizing Maps of Very Large Document Collections: Justification for the WEBSOM Method

Powerful methods are needed for interactive exploration and search from collections of miscellaneous textual documents that are available in the electronic media. Searching from text documents has traditionally been based on keywords and Boolean expressions. With the WEBSOM method a document collection may be organized into a map display that provides an overview of the collection and facilitates interactive browsing. Interesting documents can be retrieved by a content addressable search. The WEBSOM method is based on using the Self-Organizing Map algorithm for automatically learning relevant structures in the text and for organizing the document collection.