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

TL;DR

This paper introduces GRAFS, a semantic search system that visualizes concepts and their relationships to aid users in constructing mental models during exploratory search, improving understanding of complex information spaces.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel interactive system that organizes and visualizes key concepts and their relations, enhancing conceptual understanding in exploratory search tasks.

Findings

Users better recognize relationships between key concepts.

The system improves understanding of search topics.

Maintains usability comparable to traditional faceted 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.