We present Scatter/Gather, a cluster-based document browsing method, as an alternative to ranked titles for the organization and viewing of retrieval results. We systematically evaluate Scatter/Gather in this context and find significant improvements over similarity search ranking alone. This result provides evidence validating the cluster hypothesis which states that relevant documents tend to be more similar to each other than to non-relevant documents. We describe a system employing Scatter/Gather and demonstrate that users are able to use this system close to its full potential. 1 Introduction An important service offered by an information access system is the organization of retrieval results. Conventional systems rank results based on an automatic assessment of relevance to the query [20]. Alternatives include graphical displays of interdocument similarity (e.g., [1, 22, 7]), relationship to fixed attributes (e.g., [21, 14]), and query term distribution patterns (e.g., [12]). I...

TextTiling is a technique for subdividing texts into multi-paragraph units that represent passages, or subtopics. The discourse cues for identifying major subtopic shifts are patterns of lexical co-occurrence and distribution. The algorithm is fully implemented and is shown to produce segmentation that corresponds well to human judgments of the subtopic boundaries of 12 texts. Multi-paragraph subtopic segmentation should be useful for many text analysis tasks, including information retrieval and summarization. 1.

Users of Web search engines are often forced to sift through the long ordered list of document "snippets" returned by the engines. The IR community has explored document clustering as an alternative method of organizing retrieval results, but clustering has yet to be deployed on most major search engines. The NorthernLight search engine organizes its output into "custom folders" based on pre-computed document labels, but does not reveal how the folders are generated or how well they correspond to users' interests. In this paper, we introduce Grouper -- an interface to the results of the HuskySearch meta-search engine, which dynamically groups the search results into clusters labeled by phrases extracted from the snippets. In addition, we report on the first empirical comparison of user Web search behavior on a standard ranked-list presentation versus a clustered presentation. By analyzing HuskySearch logs, we are able to demonstrate substantial differences in the number of documents f...

Never before in history has data been generated at such high volumes as it is today. Exploring and analyzing the vast volumes of data is becoming increasingly difficult. Information visualization and visual data mining can help to deal with the flood of information. The advantage of visual data exploration is that the user is directly involved in the data mining process. There are a large number of information visualization techniques which have been developed over the last decade to support the exploration of large data sets. In this paper, we propose a classification of information visualization and visual data mining techniques which is based on the data type to be visualized, the visualization technique, and the interaction and distortion technique. We exemplify the classification using a few examples, most of them referring to techniques and systems presented in this special section.

In this paper we review studies of the growth of the Internet and technologies that are useful for information search and retrieval on the Web. We present data on the Internet from several different sources, e.g., current as well as projected number of users, hosts, and Web sites. Although numerical figures vary, overall trends cited

We introduce a technique for creating novel, textuallyenhanced thumbnails of Web pages. These thumbnails combine the advantages of image thumbnails and text summaries to provide consistent performance on a variety of tasks. We conducted a study in which participants used three different types of summaries (enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries) to search Web pages to find several different types of information. Participants took an average of 67, 86, and 95 seconds to find the answer with enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries, respectively. We found a strong effect of

There are numerous problems associated with formulating queries on networked information systems. These include increased data volume and complexity, accompanied by slow network access. This paper proposes a new approach to a network query user interfaces that consists of two phases: query preview and query refinement. This new approach is based on the concepts of dynamic queries and query previews, which guides users in rapidly and dynamically eliminating undesired records, reducing the data volume to a manageable size, and refining queries locally before submission over a network. Examples of two applications are given: a Restaurant Finder and a prototype for NASA's Earth Observing Systems--Data Information Systems (EOSDIS). Data architecture is discussed and user feedback is presented. Final version 2 Keywords: user interface, direct manipulation, dynamic query, information system, metadata, query preview, query refinement, science data, NASA EOSDIS. 1. INTRODUCTION The explorat...

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....

This paper presents design considerations for the construction of advanced information environments, and a prototype interface that attempts to respond to them. The design considerations came from task analyses of information gathering activities, from changes in the global information environment, and from advances in humancomputer interaction. These led to a number of desired design properties that are guiding our prototyping efforts, including the system, NaviQue, detailed here. It is a visually rich environment for information gathering and organizing, based on a navigable, fractal structure of information, ubiquitous queriability, lightweight interaction with ad hoc sets, and information visualization. The resulting interaction paradigm smoothly integrates more than a half dozen synergies between querying, navigation and organization. KEYWORDS: digital library, multiscale worlds, query, navigation, browsing, search, information visualization, information gathering environments I...

We report on the design and evaluation of a visualization tool for Information Retrieval (IR) systems that aims to help the end user in the following respects: . As an indicator of document relevance, the tool graphically provides specific query related information about individual documents . As a diagnosis tool, it graphically provides aggregate information about the query results that could help in identifying how the different query terms influence the retrieval and ranking of documents. Two different experiments using TREC-4 data were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this tool. Results, while mixed, indicate that visualization of this sort may provide useful support for judging the relevance of documents, in particular by enabling users to make more accurate decisions about which documents to inspect in detail. Problems in evaluation of such tools in interactive environments are discussed. 1 Introduction The disadvantages of Boolean IR systems are well known. Best-matc...