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We present a new technique, the phrase net, for generating visual overviews of unstructured text. A phrase net displays a graph whose nodes are words and whose edges indicate that two words are linked by a user-specified relation. These relations may be defined either at the syntactic or lexical level; different relations often produce very different perspectives on the same text. Taken together, these perspectives often provide an illuminating visual overview of the key concepts and relations in a document or set of documents.