Studying Visual Analytics Support for Interactive Information Retrieval within Complex Search Settings

这项研究解决了一个问题，这个问题在我们以信息为中心的现代生活中变得越来越重要。随着我们已经变得善于在网络上搜索事实信息，我们越来越多地发现需要在专门的知识库中解决复杂的信息搜索问题。虽然网络搜索引擎支持使用简单的搜索界面来查找针对特定问题的单页答案，但对复杂信息查找任务的支持是有限的。解决这样的问题需要的不仅仅是查看搜索结果列表中的前几个文档;搜索者可能需要在潜在的大量搜索结果中探索并理解它们，随着信息寻找目标变得更精确而细化查询，并且综合从多个查询以及潜在地在多个信息寻找会话上收集的信息。

This research addresses a problem that is becoming increasingly important in our modern information-centric lives. As we have become adept at searching the web for factual information, we are increasingly discovering the need to address complex information seeking problems within specialized knowledge repositories. While web search engines support finding single-page answers to focused questions using simple search interfaces, support for complex information seeking tasks is limited. Resolving such problems requires more than just viewing the top few documents in the search results list; the searcher may need to explore among and make sense of a potentially large number of search results, refine the query as the information seeking goal becomes more precise, and synthesize information gleaned from multiple queries and potentially over multiple information seeking sessions.