Improving Interactive Retrieval by Combining Ranked Lists and Clustering

We study the problem of organizing the documents returned by an information retrieval system in response to a natural language query. We consider two well-known approaches – the ranked list and clustering of the results – and we show how they can be integrated. This new procedure is designed to accept user feedback and direct the user toward the relevant material as effectively as the traditional relevance feedback approach. We show how our technique can be explained to the user by visualizing the process in two or three dimensions, providing him or her with complete control of the procedure. We show that increasing the dimensionality of the visualization generally improves its quality, albeit only a small amount. Additionally we present the result of a small user study designed to investigate how effective our visualization is in supporting the user navigating the retrieved results.