Knowledge Navigator: LLM-guided Browsing Framework for Exploratory Search in Scientific Literature

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration.We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics.This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents.Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method.We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCI-TOC.Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.