Finding Needles in Document Haystacks: Augmenting Serendipitous Claim Retrieval Workflows

Preliminary exploration of vast text corpora for generating and validating hypotheses, typical in academic inquiry, requires flexible navigation and rapid validation of claims. Navigating the corpus by titles, summaries, and abstracts might neglect information, whereas identifying the relevant context-specific claims through in-depth reading is unfeasible with rapidly increasing publication numbers. Our paper identifies three typical user pathways for hypothesis exploration and operationalizes sentence-based retrieval combined with effective contextualization and provenance tracking in a unified workflow. We contribute an interface that augments the previously laborious tasks of claim identification and consistency checking using NLP techniques while balancing user control and serendipity. Use cases, expert interviews, and a user study with 10 participants demonstrate how the proposed workflow enables users to traverse literature corpora in novel and efficient ways. For the evaluation, we instantiate the tool within two independent domains, providing novel insights into the analysis of political discourse and medical research.