Multiple perspective interactive search: a paradigm for exploratory search and information retrieval on the web

  • Authors:

  • Rahul Singh;Ya-Wen Hsu;Naureen Moon

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA 94132;Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA 94132;Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA 94132

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) represents the largest and arguably the most complex repository of content at our current state of technological development. Information on the web is represented using a variety of media, with a (current) predominance of text- and images-based data and increasing presence of other media such as video and audio. The complexity and heterogeneity of the information implies that the associated semantics is often user-dependent and emergent. Thus, there is a need to develop novel paradigms for web-based user-data interactions that emphasize user context and interactivity with the goal of facilitating exploration, interpretation, retrieval, and assimilation of information. This article presents a novel presentation-interaction paradigm for exploratory web search which allows simultaneous and semantically correlated presentation of query results from different semantic perspectives. Users can explore the results either using a specific perspective or through a combination of perspectives via highly-intuitive yet powerful interaction operators. In the proposed paradigm, hits obtained from executing a query are first analyzed to determine latent content-based correlations between the pages. Next, the pages are analyzed to extract different types of perceptual and informational cues. This information is used to organize and present the results through an interactive and reflective user interface which supports both exploration and search. Experimental investigations, many of which are conducted in comparative settings, analyze the proposed approach in query-retrieval scenarios involving complex information goals. These results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach and provide important insights for the development of the next-generation of interfaces for web-search.