Visualização em nuvens de texto como apoio à busca exploratória na web

• Ano de defesa: 2008
• Autor(a) principal: Lunardi, Marcia Severo
• Orientador(a): Monat, André Soares
• Banca de defesa: Lessa, Washington Dias , Farias, Priscila Lena
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Design
• Departamento: Centro de Tecnologia e Ciências::Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial
• País: BR
• Palavras-chave em Português: Nuvens de Texto; Visualização de Informações; Design da Informação; Design de Interface; Sistemas de Busca; Busca Exploratória; Recuperação de Informações
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Text Clouds; Information Visualization; Information Design; Interface Design; Web Search; Exploratory Search; Information Retrieval
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: CNPQ::CIENCIAS SOCIAIS APLICADAS::DESENHO INDUSTRIAL
• Link de acesso: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/9166

This dissertation presents the results of a research that evaluates the advantages of text clouds to the visualization of web search results. A text cloud is a visualization technique for texts and textual data in general. Its main purpose is to enhance comprehension of a large body of text by summarizing it automatically and is generally applied for managing information overload. While continual improvements in search technology have made it possible to quickly find relevant information on the web, few search engines do anything to organize or to summarize the contents of such responses beyond ranking the items in a list. In exploratory searches, users may be forced to scroll through many pages to identify the information they seek and are generally not provided with any way to visualize the totality of the results returned. This research is divided in two parts. Part one describes the development of an application that generates text clouds for the summarization of search results from the standard result list provided by the Yahoo search engine. The second part describes the evaluation of this application. Adapted to this specific context, a text cloud is generated from the text of the first sites returned by the search engine according to its relevance algorithms. The benefit of this application is that it enables users to obtain a visual overview of the main results at once. From this overview the users can obtain keywords to navigate to potential relevant subjects that otherwise would be hidden deep down in the response list. Also, users can realize by visualizing the results in context that his initial query term was not the best choice.