Adding Boolean-Quality Control to Best-Match Searching via an Improved User Interface

Abstract

While end users these days seem happy with best-match text-retrieval systems, it appears that expert searchers still prefer exact-match (Boolean) text-retrieval systems by an overwhelming margin. This is somewhat surprising. Most expert searchers were probably trained with Boolean systems, and an obvious factor is simply preferring the familiar, but we argue that a second major factor is that these experts feel a much greater sense of control with Boolean than with best-match systems. We have designed a best-match system, MIRV, incorporating user-interface features that we believe will give experts a sense of control comparable to that of Boolean systems and that we believe end users will also be happy with. We implemented MIRV's document viewer and did a controlled user study, with encouraging results.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADA442685

Entities

People

  • Donald Byrd
  • Rodion Podorozhny

Organizations

  • University of Massachusetts Amherst

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Databases
  • Experimental Design
  • Frequency
  • Graphical User Interface
  • Information Retrieval
  • Judgment
  • Language
  • Lepidoptera
  • Natural Languages
  • Quality Control
  • Standards
  • User Interface
  • Word Processors
  • World Wide Web

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Educational Psychology