An Interface to Support Multi-faceted Information Seeking and Targeted Relevance Feedback

In the seminar, I will describe a user study of a novel information seeking interface that provides support for multi-faceted information seeking and targeted relevance feedback. The user interface is based on a document ‘pile’ metaphor that allows a user to arrange retrieved documents in visible piles, label these piles according to various aspects/facets of their search, and request the system to find documents similar to those contained within piles. Two interfaces were devised to evaluate the pile metaphor and similarity searching and a within-subjects laboratory experiment with 24 subjects was conducted. Although we found no significant differences in retrieval effectiveness between interfaces, subjects showed a strong preference for the pile interface with similarity searching compared to the other without similarity searching. Results demonstrate some significant differences between usability assessments of each interface and in the interactions in which subjects engaged while they were seeking information. We believe these results provide some evidence in support of the efficacy and benefits of the ‘pile’ metaphor and of the integrated similarity search, based on relevance feedback