1. SIMS 202 Information Organization and Retrieval
Prof. Marti Hearst and Prof. Ray Larson
UC Berkeley SIMS
Tues/Thurs 9:30-11:00am
Fall 2000

2. Last Time Starting points (cont) UIs for Query Specification Clusters
Examples as starting points
Automated Source Selection
UIs for Query Specification

3. Today Finish UIs Midterm Review UIs for Query Specification (cont)
UIs for Putting Results in Context
UIs to support the Search Process
Midterm Review

4. Query Specification

5. Query Specification Interaction Styles (Shneiderman 97) Example:
Command Language
Form Fillin
Menu Selection
Direct Manipulation
Natural Language
Example:
How do each apply to Boolean Queries

6. Command-Based Query Specification
command attribute value connector …
find pa shneiderman and tw user#
What are the attribute names?
What are the command names?
What are allowable values?

7. Form-Based Query Specification (Altavista)

8. Form-Based Query Specification (Melvyl)

9. Form-based Query Specification (Infoseek)

10. Direct Manipulation Spec. VQUERY (Jones 98)

11. Menu-based Query Specification (Young & Shneiderman 93)

12. Context

13. Putting Results in Context
Visualizations of Query Term Distribution
KWIC, TileBars, SeeSoft
Visualizing Shared Subsets of Query Terms
InfoCrystal, VIBE, Lattice Views
Table of Contents as Context
Superbook, Cha-Cha, DynaCat
Organizing Results with Tables
Envision, SenseMaker
Using Hyperlinks
WebCutter

14. Putting Results in Context
Interfaces should
give hints about the roles terms play in the collection
give hints about what will happen if various terms are combined
show explicitly why documents are retrieved in response to the query
summarize compactly the subset of interest

15. KWIC (Keyword in Context)
An old standard, ignored by internet search engines
used in some intranet engines, e.g., Cha-Cha

16. Display of Retrieval Results
Goal: minimize time/effort for deciding which documents to examine in detail
Idea: show the roles of the query terms in the retrieved documents, making use of document structure

17. TileBars Graphical Representation of Term Distribution and Overlap
Simultaneously Indicate:
relative document length
query term frequencies
query term distributions
query term overlap

18. Example Query terms: What roles do they play in retrieved documents?
DBMS (Database Systems)
Reliability
Mainly about both DBMS & reliability
Mainly about DBMS, discusses reliability
Mainly about, say, banking, with a subtopic discussion on DBMS/Reliability
Mainly about high-tech layoffs

20. Key Aspect: Faceted Queries
Conjunct of disjuncts
Each disjunct is a concept
osteoporosis, bone loss
prevention, cure
research, Mayo clinic, study
User does not have to specify which are main topics, which are subtopics
Ranking algorithm gives higher weight to overlap of topics

21. Main Topic Context Potential Problem with TileBars Solution:
Given retrieved documents in which no query terms are well-distributed,
The user does not know the context in which the query terms are used
Solution:
Accompany with main topic display

22. TileBars Summary
Compact, graphical representation of term distribution for full text retrieval results
simultaneously display term frequency, distribution, overlap, and doc length
allow for simple user-determined ordering strategies

23. TileBars Summary Preliminary User Studies users understand them
find them helpful in some situations
sometimes terms need to be disambiguated

24. SeeSoft: Showing Text Content using a linear representation and brushing and linking (Eick & Wills 95)

25. Query Term Subsets
Show how often each query term occurs in retrieved documents
VIBE (Korfhage ‘91)
InfoCrystal (Spoerri ‘94)
Problems:
can’t see overlap of terms within docs
quantities not represented graphically
more than 4 terms hard to handle
no help in selecting terms to begin with

26. InfoCrystal (Spoerri 94)

27. VIBE (Olson et al. 93, Korfhage 93)

28. Superbook (Remde et al. 87)
Next-generation hyper-media book
Functions:
Word Lookup:
Show a list query words, stems, and word combinations
Table of Contents: Dynamic fisheye view of the hierarchical topics list
Search words can be highlighted here too
Page of Text: show selected page and highlighted search terms
Hypertext features linking through search words rather than page links

29. Superbook (http://superbook.bellcore.com/SB)

30. DynaCat (Pratt 97) Decide on important question types in an advance
What are the adverse effects of drug D?
What is the prognosis for treatment T?
Make use of MeSH categories
Retain only those types of categories known to be useful for this type of query.

31. DynaCat (Pratt, Hearst, & Fagan 99)

32. DynaCat Study Design Results Three queries 24 cancer patients
Compared three interfaces
ranked list, clusters, categories
Results
Participants strongly preferred categories
Participants found more answers using categories
Participants took same amount of time with all three interfaces

33. Cha-Cha (Chen & Hearst 98)
Shows “table-of-contents”-like view, like Superbook
Takes advantage of human-created structure within hyperlinks to create the TOC

34. Supporting the Information Seeking Process

35. Supporting the Process
Interfaces to support the process of information seeking
Standard Model
Infogrid
Superbook
Berry Picking Model
SketchTrieve
DLITE
Retaining Search History

36. How to Present the Search Process?
What sequence of operations is allowed?
Which GUI layout style is used?
One window
Overlapping windows
Tiled windows
Monolithic layout
One big window containing specialized internal windows that always occupy the same position and function

37. Infogrid (design mockup) (Rao et al. 92)

38. Infogrid Design Mockups (Rao et al. 92)

39. Protofoil (Rao et al. 94)

40. InfoGrid/Protofoil (Rao et al. 92)
A general search interface architecture
Itemstash -- retrieved docs
Search Event -- current query
History -- history of queries
Result Item -- view selected docs + metadata
Slide by Shankar Raman

41. SuperBook (Egan et al. 89)
Experimented with many variations of the layout and interaction sequence.
Several studies have shown that too many different options are worse than an interface that is too restrictive.
Considered different screen sizes
Monolithic layout favored, however ...
Sequence of interactions is what matters
Smaller screen can force designers to consider the interaction sequence carefully

42. Monolithic Layouts
Protofoil Layout (Hypothetical)
Superbook Layout

43. DLITE UI to a digital library
Direct manipulation interface to a distributed info. system
must show network, remote server status
Workcenter approach
lots of handy tools for one task
experts create workcenters
contents persistent
concurrently shareable across sites
Web browser used to display document or collection metadata
Slide by Shankar Raman

44. DLITE (Cousins 97) Drag and Drop interface
Reify queries, sources, retrieval results
Animation to keep track of activity
Slide by Shankar Raman

45. Components/tools in DLITE
Documents (search results, or local documents)
Collections of components (e.g. result sets)
Queries -- translator used to apply same query to many sources
Services -- search services, summarization, OCR, translation …
People (for access control, payment …)
Slide by Shankar Raman

46. Interaction Pointing at object brings up tooltip -- metadata
Activating object -- component specific action
5 types for result set component
Drag-and-drop data onto program
Animation used to show what happens with drag-and-drop (e.g. “waggling”)
Slide by Shankar Raman

47. Comments
Users seem to have lots of problem with flexibility (result set icon activation)
Workcenter -- customization, acts as reminder
Animation used to track progess, (partial) results
Slide by Shankar Raman

48. Keeping Track of History
Examples
List of prior queries and results (standard)
Graphical hierarchy for web browsing
“Slide sorter” view, snapshots of earlier interactions

49. PadPrints (Hightower et al. 98)
Tree-based history of recently visited web-pages history map placed to left of browser window
Zoomable, can shrink sub-hierarchies]
Node = title + thumbnail
Slide by Shankar Raman

50. PadPrints (Hightower et al. 98)

51. PadPrints (Hightower et al. 98)

52. PadPrints (Hightower et al. 98)

53. Initial User Study of PadPrints
13.4% unable to find recently visited pages
only 0.1% use History button, 42% use Back
problems with history list (according to authors)
incomplete, lose out on every branch
textual (not necessarily a problem! )
pull down menu cumbersome -- cannot see history along with current document
Slide by Shankar Raman

54. Second User Study of Padprints
Changed the task to involve revisiting web pages
Only correctly answered questions considered
20-30% fewer pages accessed
faster response time for tasks that involve revisiting pages
slightly better user satisfaction ratings
Slide by Shankar Raman

55. Summary: UIs for Information Access
The part of the system that the user sees and interacts with
Better interfaces in future should produce better search experiences
UIs for search should
Help users keep track of what they have done
Suggest next choices
Support the process of search
It is very difficult to design good UIs
It is very difficult to evaluate search UIs