Evaluation of an interactive topic detection and tracking interface

Interactive Topic Detection and Tracking (iTDT) refers to the TDT works which focused on user interaction, user evaluation and user interfaces aspects. This paper investigates and identifies the elements of the design of an interface that aims to facilitate journalists to perform TDT tasks. Therefore we present an (iTDT) interface called Interactive Event Tracking (iEvent) and evaluate the usability of the features introduced. We conduct a user experiment to investigate the effectiveness and usefulness of the features introduced and report what TDT tasks these features are facilitating. We show that the interface enables journalists to perform well in TDT tasks and we have identified potential guidelines for future designs of the iTDT interfaces for TDT task.