The objective of the paper is to amalgamate theories of text retrieval from various research traditions into a cognitive theory for information retrieval interaction. Set in a cognitive framework, the paper outlines the concept of polyrepresentation applied to both the user's cognitive space and the information space of IR systems. The concept seeks to represent the current user's information need, problem state, and domain work task or interest in a structure of causality. Further, it implies that we should apply different methods of representation and a variety of IR techniques of different cognitive and functional origin simultaneously to each semantic full-text entity in the information space. The cognitive differences imply that by applying cognitive overlaps of information objects, originating from different interpretations of such objects through time and by type, the degree of uncertainty inherent in IR is decreased. Polyrepresentation and the use of cognitive overlaps are associated with, but not identical to, data

An integrated visual thesaurus and result browser to support information retrieval was designed using a task model of information searching. The system provided a hierarchical thesaurus with a results cluster display representing similarity between retrieved documents and relevance ranking using a bullseye metaphor. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) was used as the retrieval engine and to calculate the similarity between documents. The design was tested with two information retrieval tasks. User behaviour, performance and attitude were recorded as well as usability problems. The system had few usability problems and users liked the visualisations, but recall performance was poor. The reasons for poor/good performance were investigated by examining user behaviour and search strategies. Better searchers used the visualisations more effectively and spent longer on the task, whereas poorer performances were attributable to poor motivation, difficulty in assessing article relevance and poor use of system visualisations. Furthermore, the bullseye display appeared to encourage limited evaluation of article relevance on titles, leading to poor performance. The bullseye display metaphor for article relevance was understood by users; however, they were confused by the concept of similarity searching expressed as visual clusters. The conclusions from the study are that while visual user interfaces for information searching might seem to be usable, they may not actually improve performance. Extensive training and advisor facilities to propose effective search strategies need to be incorporated with visual information retrieval systems. 1.

We have developed an in6 vative searchin terface that allowsnAOz5z ert users to move through large in97z86 tion spacesin a flexible manle without feelin lost. The design goal was to o#er users a "browsin the shelves" experien5 seamlessly in tegrated with focused search. Key to achievin our goal is the explicit exposure of hierarchical faceted metadatain a manz6 that is in tuitive an in vitin to users. After several iteration of design an testinA the usability results are strikinA] positive. We believe our approach marks a major step forward in search userin terfacesan can serve as a model for web-based collection of up to 100,000 items.

Search systems have for some time provided users with the ability to request documents similar to a given document. Interfaces provide this feature via a link or button for each document in the search results. We call this feature findsimilar or similarity browsing. We examined find-similar as a search tool, like relevance feedback, for improving retrieval performance. Our investigation focused on find-similar’s document-to-document similarity, the reexamination of documents during a search, and the user’s browsing pattern. Find-similar with a query-biased similarity, avoiding the reexamination of documents, and a breadth-like browsing pattern achieved a 23 % increase in the arithmetic mean average precision and a 66 % increase in the geometric mean average precision over our baseline retrieval. This performance matched that of a more traditionally styled iterative relevance feedback technique.

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Query expansion is the process of supplementing an original query with additional terms in order to refine a search and increase retrieval effectiveness. If the query expansion is interactive, then the user and the system work together to expand the query. The system usually suggests possible expansion terms and the user selects those they wish to add to the query. Studies have shown that interactive query expansion has the potential to improve retrieval effectiveness, but that it rarely succeeds in achieving its potential. It has been shown that users desire some control over the expansion process. In order to achieve this, the functionality of the system must be represented on the user interface in a comprehensible way. The main aim of this study is to focus on a small aspect of the interface and investigate whether the method used to present potential query expansion terms has any effect on retrieval effectiveness. The tool tested in this study automatically generates a hierarchical...

Abstract. Despite its potential to improve search effectiveness, previous research has shown that the uptake of interactive query expansion (IQE) is limited. In this paper, we investigate one method of increasing the uptake of IQE by displaying summary overviews that allow searchers to view the impact of their expansion decisions in real time, engage more with suggested terms, and support them in making good expansion decisions. Results from our user studies show that searchers use system-generated suggested terms more frequently if they know the impact of doing so on their results. We also present evidence that the usefulness of our proposed IQE approach is highest when searchers attempt unfamiliar or difficult information seeking tasks. Overall, our work presents strong evidence that searchers are more likely to engage with suggested terms if they are supported by the search interface. 1