Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

   
1. Document Surrogates

document surrogates surrogates

The most common way to show results for a query is to list information about documents in order of their computed relevance to the query. Alternatively, for pure Boolean ranking, documents are listed according to a metadata attribute, such as date. Typically the document list consists of the document's title and a subset of important metadata, such as date, source, and length of the article. In systems with statistical ranking, a numerical score or percentage is also often shown alongside the title, where the score indicates a computed degree of match or probability of relevance. This kind of information is sometimes referred to as a document surrogate. See Figure from [#!witten98!#].

  

Figure: An example of a ranked list of titles and other document surrogate information [#!witten98!#].

abstracts excerpts

Some systems provide users with a choice between a short and a detailed view. The detailed view typically contains a summary or abstract. In bibliographic systems, the author-written or service-written abstract is shown. Web search engines automatically generate excerpts, usually extracting the first few lines of non-markup text in the Web page.

In most interfaces, clicking on the document's title or an iconic representation of the document shown beside the title will bring up a view of the document itself, either in another window on the screen, or replacing the listing of search results. (In traditional bibliographic systems, the full text was unavailable online, and only bibliographic records could be readily viewed.)