Generating reading orders over document collections

Given a document collection, existing systems allow users to browse the collection or perform searches that return lists of documents ranked based on their relevance to the user query. While these approaches work fine when a user is trying to locate specific documents, they are insufficient when users need to access the pertinent documents in some logical order, for example for learning or editorial purposes. We present a system that automatically organizes a collection of documents in a tree from general to more specific documents, and allows a user to choose a reading sequence over the documents. This a novel way to content consumption that departs from the typical ranked lists of documents based on their relevance to a user query and from static navigational interfaces. We present a set of algorithms that solve the problem and we evaluate their performance as well as the reading trees generated.