Mobile Findex: Facilitating Information Access in Mobile Web Search with Automatic Result Clustering

Designing an effective mobile search user interface is challenging, as interacting with the results is often complicated by the lack of available screen space and limited interaction methods. We present Mobile Findex, a mobile search user interface that uses automatically computed result clusters to provide the user with an overview of the result set. In addition, it utilizes a focus-plus-context result list presentation combined with an intuitive browsing method to aid the user in the evaluation of results. A user study with 16 participants was carried out to evaluate Mobile Findex. Subjective evaluations show that Mobile Findex was clearly preferred by the participants over the traditional ranked result list in terms of ease of finding relevant results, suitability to tasks, and perceived efficiency. While the use of categories resulted in a lower rate of nonrelevant result selections and better precision in some tasks, an overall significant difference in search performance was not observed

Multiple related document summary and navigation using concept hierarchies for mobile clients

Mobile clients have limited display and navigation capabilities. To browse a set of documents, an intuitive method is to navigate through concept hierarchies. To reduce semantic loading for each term that represents the concepts and the cognitive loading of users due to the limited display, similar documents are grouped together before concept hierarchies are constructed for each document group. Since the concept hierarchies only represent the salient concepts in the documents, term extraction is necessary. Our pilot experiments showed that an unconventional combination of term frequency and inverse document frequency yielded similar performance (i.e. 71%) to previous work and the use of terms in titles achieved better performance than previous work (i.e. 82%). Our preliminary results of building concept hierarchies after clustering compared to that without is encouraging (c.f. 82% and 67%). We believe that further research can enhance the performance of concept hierarchies to a level for commercial deployment for mobile clients.Department of ComputingRefereed conference pape