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The current availability of large collections of full-text documents in electronic form emphasizes the need for intelligent information retrieval techniques. Especially in the rapidly growing World Wide Web it is important to have methods for exploring miscellaneous document collections automatically. In the report, we introduce the WEBSOM method for this task. Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) are used to position encoded documents onto a map that provides a general view into the text collection. The general view visualizes similarity relations between the documents on a map display, which can be utilized in exploring the material rather than having to rely on traditional search expressions. Similar documents become mapped close to each other. The potential of the WEBSOM method is demonstrated in a case study where articles from the Usenet newsgroup\comp. ai. neural-nets" are organized. The map is available for exploration at the WWW address http://websom. hut./websom/