Interactive TREC-4 at Georgia Tech

At Georgia Tech, we investigate the effectiveness of a visualization scheme for Information Retrieval systems. Displayed like a bar-graph, the visualization tool shows the distribution of query words in the set of documents retrieved in response to a query. We found that end-users use the visualization for two purposes :- to gain specific information about individual documents - such as the distribution of different query words in that document.- to gain aggregate information about the query result in general - such as getting a sense of the direction of the query results.In general they used the visualization tool as much as the title and full text in the process of deciding if a document addresses the given search topic. In structured post-session interviews with searchers, we also obtained information about what the searcher liked, what was frustrating to them, and what they wanted in the system