A User Interaction Model for Browsing Based on Category-Level Operations

Abstract

We propose a user interaction model for browsing based on itera tive category-level operations. The motivation comes from two observations: 1) people naturally think in terms of categories, and 2) in browsing, the types of categories that are salient to users change as they browse. We define a set of category-level operations that lets users iteratively view and find results in terms of these changing category types. We also show that we can express some standard IR operations as iteratively applied sequences of a funda mental category-level operation (thus unifying them). Finally, we describe SenseMaker, a prototype interface for browsing heteroge neous sources.