Reaction- TileBars: Visualization of Term Distribution Information in Full Text Information Access

This paper talks about textual analysis of the entire document so as to give a better and very close result to the searched items. Prior to this most of the textual search was based on title and abstract of the paper. I personally feel that it will really affect the search results. There have been instances in the past when I am looking for an academic paper and the search result are so broad and I'm often overwhelmed by the number of results not of any use to me. Also I even wonder how the search results are ranked in order and how legitimate that ordering is.

This paper proposes a new and quite intuitive style of display called TileBars. What they have tried to do is to provide the user with a relative view of the length of the document, and allow them to query term frequencies and distributional properties. They also talk about TextTiling to determine the structure of the document. In my opinion this is fine for general style papers of limited size following a specified structure e.g. Academic papers but I don't think it would be very optimal to use this approach for very lengthy documents like novels etc.

I agree with the author that information access mechanisms should not be thought of as retrieval in isolation as there are a lot of dependencies on other things like document subsets. But I would still like to see how this approach is extended to large documents and how the TileBars will look in that case. Overall it was an interesting read as it introduced me to something new.