Interface design for an interactive information retrieval system: A literature survey and a research system description

This article focuses on the human interaction characteristics of an information retrieval system, suggests some design considerations to improve man‐machine cooperation, and describes a research system at Stanford that is exploring some of these techniques. Librarians can only be of limited assistance in helping the naive user formulate an unstructured feeling in his mind into an appropriate search query that maps into the retrieval system. Consequently, the process of query formulation by the user, interactively with the information available in the system, remains one of the principal problems in information retrieval today. In an attempt to solve this problem by improving the interface communication between man and the computer, we have pursued the objective of displaying hierarchically structured index trees on a CRT in a decision tree format permitting the user merely to point (with a light pen) at alternatives which seem most appropriate to him. Using his passive rather than his active vocabulary expands his interaction vocabulary by at least an order of magnitude. Moreover, a hierarchically displayed index is a modified thesaurus, and may be augmented by adding lateral links to provide semantic assistance to the user. A hierarchical structure was chosen because it seems to replicate the structure of cognitive thought processes most closely, thus allowing the simplest, most direct transfer of the man's problem into the structure and vocabulary of the system.