GRAFS: Graphical Faceted Search System to Support Conceptual Understanding in Exploratory Search

Abstract

When people search for information about a new topic within large document collections, they implicitly construct a mental model of the unfamiliar information space to represent what they currently know and guide their exploration into the unknown. Building this mental model can be challenging as it requires not only finding relevant documents, but also synthesizing important concepts and the relationships that connect those concepts both within and across documents. This paper describes a novel interactive approach designed to help users construct a mental model of an unfamiliar information space during exploratory search. We propose a new semantic search system to organize and visualize important concepts and their relations for a set of search results. A user study (𝑛 = 20) was conducted to compare the proposed approach against a baseline faceted search system on exploratory literature search tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is more effective in helping users recognize relationships between key concepts, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of the search topic while maintaining similar functionality and usability as a faceted search system.

Thinking inside the box: An evaluation of a novel search‐assisting tool for supporting (meta)cognition during exploratory search

“…Our findings also confirm and extend previous work by elucidating why certain activities are crucial to support during exploratory search (e.g., saving search history, facilitating faceted exploration, saving metadata of retrieved information, organizing information, and taking notes; Donato et al, 2010;Guo et al, 2023;Morris et al, 2008;White & Roth, 2009). In our work, we show how users' integrated their search behaviors and use of the interface features in support of their cognitive and metacognitive goals.…”

“…Liu et al (2022) designed a faceted search system ROGUE to help users explore and navigate spaces with images. Guo et al (2023) developed the GRAFS interface to help exploratory searchers to construct their mental model of a topic area during an exploratory search.…”