This paper presents a means of automatically deriving a hierarchical organization of concepts from a set of documents without use of training data or standard clustering techniques. Instead, salient words and phrases extracted from the documents are organized hierarchically using a type of co-occurrence known as subsumption. The resulting structure is displayed as a series of hierarchical menus. When generated from a set of retrieved documents, a user browsing the menus is provided with a

more »

... ed overview of their content in a manner distinct from existing overview and summarization techniques. The methods used to build the structure are simple, but appear to be effective: a smallscale user study reveals that the generated hierarchy possesses properties expected of such a structure in that general terms are placed at the top levels leading to related and more specific terms below. The formation and presentation of the hierarchy is described along with the user study and some other informal evaluations. Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington VA 22202-4302. Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to a penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number.