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Optimizing word search within documents by showing results in the context

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Abstract

Searching for text in a document is a day-to-day task supported by a variety of visual interface techniques. Since the target searching word may be scattered across the document, manually checking each word is exhaustive and time-consuming, which calls for effective visualization of the search results to enable efficient visual document analysis. In this paper, we revisit the problem of visualizing word search results and formulate two design goals: minimizing the number of user interactions and optimizing the on-screen information of search results. Two visualization techniques are introduced accordingly: a structured list that integrates search results with the hierarchical document structure and full sentence snippets to provide more complete local context for each matched result. We then conduct a user study to compare these techniques with some most commonly used visual interfaces. The results show that the structured list is preferred by most participants and leads to more efficient search, whereas the full sentence snippet results in a slight improvement in accuracy and efficiency, but is still appreciated by the participants.

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Acknowledgements

The authors like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable input. This work was supported by the grants of the Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (JCYJ20180507182222355), and NSFC (62132017, 62141217).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Aoshanwei Street, Qingdao, 250100, China

    Cheng Peng, Tong Ge & Yunhai Wang

  2. Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Taoyuan Street, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Cheng Peng

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  1. Cheng Peng
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  2. Tong Ge
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  3. Yunhai Wang
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Correspondence to Yunhai Wang.

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Peng, C., Ge, T. & Wang, Y. Optimizing word search within documents by showing results in the context. J Vis 26, 441–455 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-022-00880-5

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