Week 8: Reading Notes

Marti A. Hearst Chapter 1: 
(http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/sui_ch1_design.html)

    This chapter has introduced the ideas and practices surrounding user interface design in general, and search interface design in particular. It has explained some of the difficulties with search interface design and provided a set of design guidelines tailored specifically to search user interfaces. These guidelines include:

• Offer efficient and informative feedback,
• Balance user control with automated actions,
• Reduce short-term memory load,
• Provide shortcuts,
• Reduce errors,
• Recognize the importance of small details, and
• Recognize the importance of aesthetics.

    This chapter has also summarized some of the most successful design ideas that are commonly in use in search interfaces today. This summary is based on generalizing over the results of years of research, experimentation, and tests in the marketplace. The coming years should reveal additional new, exciting ideas that will become reliable standards for search user interfaces.

Marti A. Hearst Chapter 11: 

(http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/sui_ch11_text_analysis_visualization.html)

    Visualization is a promising tool for the analysis and understanding of text collections, including semi-structured text as found in citation collections, and for applications such as literary analysis. Although not shown in this chapter, visualization has also been applied to online conversations and other forms of social interaction which have textual components. With the advent of social visualization Web sites like IBM's manyeyes.com, and other tools that continue to make visualization generally accessible to users who are not programmers, it is likely that the use of visualization for analysis of text will only continue to grow in popularity.

IIR Chapter 10:

   Information retrieval systems are often contrasted with relational databases.Traditionally, IR systems have retrieved information from unstructured text– by which we mean “raw” text without markup. Databases are designed for querying relational data.
    After presenting the basic concepts of XML in Section 10.1, this chapter first discusses the challengeswe face in XML retrieval (Section 10.2). Next we describe a vector space model for XML retrieval (Section 10.3). Section 10.4 presents INEX, a shared task evaluation that has been held for a number of years and currently is the most important venue for XML retrieval research. We discuss the differences between data centric and text-centric approaches to XML in Section 10.5.
    An XML document is an ordered, labeled tree. Each node of the tree is an XML element and is written with an opening and closing tag. An element can have one or more XML attributes.
    The premier venue for research on XML retrieval is the INEX (INitiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval) program, a collaborative effort that has produced reference collections, sets of queries, and relevance judgments.