MindTrellis: Co-Creating Knowledge Structures with AI through Interactive Visual Exploration
For knowledge workers synthesizing information from multiple documents, MindTrellis provides a novel interactive system that reduces cognitive load and improves structural quality of knowledge representations.
MindTrellis enables users and AI to co-create dynamic knowledge graphs from multiple documents, outperforming retrieval-only baselines in knowledge organization and cognitive load in a user study with 12 participants.
Knowledge workers face increasing challenges in synthesizing information from multiple documents into structured conceptual understanding. This process is inherently iterative: users explore content, identify relationships between concepts, and continuously reorganize their mental models. However, current approaches offer limited support. LLM-based systems let users query information but not shape how knowledge is organized; manual tools like mind maps support structure creation but lack intelligent assistance. This leaves an open opportunity: supporting collaborative construction where users and AI jointly develop an evolving knowledge representation. We present MindTrellis, an interactive visual system where users and AI collaboratively build a dynamic knowledge graph. Users can query the graph to retrieve document-grounded information, and contribute by introducing new concepts, modifying relationships, and reorganizing the hierarchy to reflect their developing understanding. In a user study where 12 participants created slide decks, MindTrellis outperformed retrieval-only baselines in knowledge organization and cognitive load, as measured by expert ratings of content coverage and structural quality.