Visualizing social links in exploratory search

ABSTRACT

The visualization of results is a critical component in search engines, and the standard ranked list interface has been a consistently predominant model. The emergence of social media provides a new opportunity to investigate visualization techniques that expose socially derived links between objects to support their exploration. Here we introduce and evaluate network-based visualizations for facilitating the exploration of a Web knowledge space. We developed a force directed network interface to visualize the result sets provided by GiveALink.org, a social bookmarking site. The classifications and tags by users are aggregated to build a social similarity network between bookmarked resources. We administered a user study to evaluate the potential of leveraging such social links in an exploratory search task. During exploration, the similarity links are used to arrange the resources in a semantic layout. Users in our study prefer a hybrid interface combining a conventional ranked list and a two dimensional network map, allowing them to find the same amount of relevant information using fewer queries. This behavior is a direct result of the additional structural information present in the network visualization, which aids them in the exploration of the information space.

REFERENCES

• 1: James Allan , Anton Leuski , Russell Swan , Donald Byrd, Evaluating combinations of ranked lists and visualizations of inter-document similarity, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.37 n.3, p.435-458, May 2001 [doi>10.1016/S0306-4573(00)00056-X]
• 2: R. Beale , R. J. McNab , I. H. Witten, Visualising sequences of queries: a new tool for information retrieval, Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Information Visualisation, p.57, August 27-28, 1997
• 3: M. Boulos. The use of interactive graphical maps for browsing medical/health internet information resources. International Journal of Health Geographics, 2:1, 2003.
• 4: S. Jeromy Carrière , Rick Kazman, WebQuery: searching and visualizing the Web through connectivity, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, v.29 n.8-13, p.1257-1267, Sep. 1997
• 5: C. Cattuto, A. Baldassarri, V. D. P. Servedio, and V. Loreto. Emergent community structure in social tagging systems. In Proc. European Conf. on Complex Systems (ECCS), Dresden, 2007.
• 6: Fernando Das-Neves , Edward A. Fox , Xiaoyan Yu, Connecting topics in document collections with stepping stones and pathways, Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, October 31-November 05, 2005, Bremen, Germany [doi>10.1145/1099554.1099573]
• 7: Thomas M. J. Fruchterman , Edward M. Reingold, Graph drawing by force-directed placement, Software—Practice & Experience, v.21 n.11, p.1129-1164, Nov. 1991 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380211102]
• 8: Zhiwei Guan , Edward Cutrell, An eye tracking study of the effect of target rank on web search, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 28-May 03, 2007, San Jose, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1240624.1240691]
• 9: Ivan Herman , Guy Melançon , M. Scott Marshall, Graph Visualization and Navigation in Information Visualization: A Survey, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.6 n.1, p.24-43, January 2000 [doi>10.1109/2945.841119]
• 10: A. Hotho, R. Jäschke, C. Schmitz, and G. Stumme. Information retrieval in folksonomies: Search and ranking. In Y. Sure and J. Domingue, editors, The Semantic Web: Research and Applications, volume 4011, pages 411--426, 2006.
• 11: Paul Jen-Hwa Hu , Pai-Chun Ma , Patrick Y. K. Chau, Evaluation of user interface designs for information retrieval systems: a computer-based experiment, Decision Support Systems, v.27 n.1-2, p.125-143, Nov. 1999 [doi>10.1016/S0167-9236(99)00040-8]
• 12: B. Kules, M. Wilson, M. Schraefel, and B. Shneiderman. From keyword search to exploration: How result visualization aids discovery on the web. Human-Computer Interaction Lab Technical Report HCIL-2008-06, University of Maryland, 2008. http://www.cs.umd.edu/localphp/hcil/tech-reportssearch.php?number=2008-06.
• 13: Steve Lawrence , C. Lee Giles, Context and Page Analysis for Improved Web Search, IEEE Internet Computing, v.2 n.4, p.38-46, July 1998 [doi>10.1109/4236.707689]
• 14: A. Leuski and J. Allan. Improving interactive retrieval by combining ranked lists and clustering. Proceedings of RIAO, pages 665--681, 2000.
• 15: Anton Leuski , James Allan, Lighthouse: Showing the Way to Relevant Information, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Vizualization 2000, p.125, October 09-10, 2000
• 16: Anton Leuski , James Allan, Interactive Information Retrieval Using Clustering and Spatial Proximity, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, v.14 n.2-3, p.259-288, June 2004 [doi>10.1023/B:USER.0000028978.09823.47]
• 17: B. Lund, T. Hammond, M. Flack, and T. Hannay. Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study - Connotea. D-Lib Magazine, 11(4), 2005.
• 18: Gary Marchionini, Exploratory search: from finding to understanding, Communications of the ACM, v.49 n.4, April 2006 [doi>10.1145/1121949.1121979]
• 19: B. Markines, L. Stoilova, and F. Menczer. Bookmark hierarchies and collaborative recommendation. In AAAI. AAAI Press, 2006.
• 20: B. Markines, L. Stoilova, and F. Menczer. Implicit tagging using donated bookmarks. In Proc. WWW Workshop on Collaborative Web Tagging, 2006.
• 21: A. Rauber, E. Pampalk, and D. Merkl. The som-enhanced jukebox: Organization and visualization of music collections based on perceptual models. Journal of New Music Research, 32:193--210, 2003.
• 22: B. Shneiderman. The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations. The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings and Reflections, 2003.
• 23: Lubomira Stoilova , Todd Holloway , Ben Markines , Ana G. Maguitman , Filippo Menczer, GiveALink: mining a semantic network of bookmarks for web search and recommendation, Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Link discovery, p.66-73, August 21-25, 2005, Chicago, Illinois [doi>10.1145/1134271.1134281]
• 24: Loren Terveen , Will Hill , Brian Amento, Constructing, organizing, and visualizing collections of topically related Web resources, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.6 n.1, p.67-94, March 1999 [doi>10.1145/310641.310644]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: Navigation

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models; Search process
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: User issues

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
interactive network visualization, social links, social search