We built two Information Retrieval systems that were targeted for the TREC-6 "aspect oriented " retrieval track. The systems were built to test the usefulness of different visualizations in an interactive IR setting---in particular, an "aspect window" for the chosen task, and a 3-D visualization of document inter-relationships. We studied 24 users of the system in order to investigate: whether the systems were more effective than a control system, whether experienced users outperformed novices, whether spatial reasoning ability was a good predictor of effective use of 3-D, and whether the systems could be compared indirectly via a control system. Our results show substantial differences in user performance are related to spatial reasoning ability and to a lesser degree other traits. We also obtained markedly different results from the direct and indirect comparisons. 1 Introduction We are interested in building and evaluating high quality information retrieval and organization tools....

Recall-oriented information retrieval requires locating as many documents as possible that are relevant to a query. Traditional information retrieval systems present results only in a ranked list. Inspired by the cluster hypothesis, we present a novel 3-D visualization tool which aids recalloriented retrieval. The visualization portrays clustered documents and concepts using a modified spring embedder. A small user study suggests this approach has merit. Keywords Information Retrieval, Visualization, 3D Interfaces INTRODUCTION Most users of Information Retrieval (IR) systems are searching a collection of documents (or web pages) for a small number of relevant texts. It is not important to them whether there are ten, 100, or even 1000 related documents, provided the retrieval system allows one or two to be found quickly. For this purpose, an interface is sufficient if it accepts a query and presents the user with a list of relevant texts--preferably ranked in order of their likeliho...

We built two Information Retrieval systems that were targeted for the TREC-6 "aspect oriented" retrieval track. The systems were built to test the usefulness of different visualizations in an interactive IR setting---in particular, an "aspect window" for the chosen task, and a 3-D visualization of document inter-relationships. We studied 24 users of the system and report the usage of different user interface elements, whether experienced users outperformed novices, and whether spatial reasoning ability was a good predictor of effective use of 3-D.

We present an evaluation of an information retrieval system designed for the 1997 TREC-6 Interactive Track; that is, Aspect Oriented Retrieval, or finding documents that cover all aspects of relevance to a given topic. Our system includes a basic search system, a task-specific "aspect window", and a 3-D visualization of document and aspect relationships. We compare two versions of our system against ZPRISE, a baseline system provided by NIST. A study of 20 searchers shows significant differences between two classes of searchers, and supports several hypotheses about the design of an aspect oriented system. An interesting result is a likely correlation between structural visualization ability and facility with a 3-D visualization. KEYWORDS Interactive Information Retrieval, User Interfaces, 3-D User Interfaces, Information Visualization, User Studies, Aspect Oriented Retrieval

Introduction The TREC-6 Interactive Track concentrated on Aspect-Oriented Retrieval: finding at least one document that covers each aspect of relevance to a given topic, as opposed to the usual information-retrieval task of simply finding documents containing as much information as possible about the topic. For this track, we at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval of the University of Massachusetts designed and ran our first-ever user study. Hypotheses We designed our systems with several hypotheses in mind about how best a system can help a user with aspect retrieval. The hypotheses that we were able to test in this experiment were: 1. A tool that is designed specifically to help the searcher keep track of aspects will be helpful. 2. A searcher will be likely to submit several queries on the same topic, so will benefit from a means for indicating which documents were seen on earlier queries. 3. Extracting the few most significant terms from a set