Visualizing information retrieval results: a demonstration of the TileBar interface

The TileBam interface is a graphical tool for users of information access systems, that shows the relationship between the terms in a query and the documents that are retrieved in response to that query. TileBars simultaneously and compactly indicate relative document length and query term overlap, frequency and distribution. The patterns in a column of TileBars are meant to help users make fast judgments about the potential relevance of the retrieved documents. An unexpected benefit of the interface is that because it requires users to specify their queries as a list of topics, better rank orderings can be obtained than with standard information retrieval ranking mechanisms.