Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

    
2. Query Term Hits Within Document Content

retrieval results!query term highlighting highlighting query term highlighting

In systems in which the user can view the full text of a retrieved document, it is often useful to highlight the occurrences of the terms or descriptors that match those of the user's query. It can also be useful for the system to scroll the view of the document to the first passage that contains one or more of the query terms, and highlight the matched terms in a contrasting color or reverse video. This display is thought to help draw the user's attention to the parts of the document most likely to be relevant to the query. Highlighting of query terms has been found time and again to be a useful feature for information access interfaces [#!landauer93!#],[#!march!#, p.31]. Color highlighting has also recently been found to be useful for scanning lists of bibliographic records [#!baldonado98!#].