This paper describes the design of a direct manipulation user interface for Boolean information retrieval. Intended to overcome the difficulties of manipulating explicit Boolean queries as well as the "black box" drawbacks of so-called natural language query systems, the interface presents a two-dimensional graphical representation of a user's natura3 language query which not only exposes heuristic query nansformations performed by the system, but also supports query reformulation by the user via direct manipulation of the representation.-The paper illustrates the operation of the interface as implemented in the AI-STARS full-text information retrieval system.

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