Highlighting Relevant Passages for Users of the Interactive SPIDER Retrieval System

We report here on our participation on the 1995 TREC-4 conference. This was limited to participation in the interactive searching task due to a re-implementation of our SPIDER retrieval system. We report on two aspects of the SPIDER system that are particulary useful for interactive searching, namely the use of fast query evaluation, and the use of passage highlighting in presenting retrieved documents to users. We also report on the lessons learned from observing people interact with our system and note the challenge faced by researchers wishing to evaluate the interactive use of information retrieval systems