Lexical navigation: Using incremental graph drawing for query refinement

Query refinement is a powerful tool for a document search and retrieval system. Lexical navigation—that is, the exploration of a network that expresses relations among all possible query terms—provides a natural mechanism for query refinement. An essential part of lexical navigation is the visualization of this network. This dynamic visualization problem is essentially one of incrementally drawing and manipulating a non-hierarchical graph. In this paper, we present the graph-drawing system we have developed for lexical navigation.