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What to do when search fails: finding information by association

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Sometimes people cannot remember the names or locations of things on their computer, but they can remember what other things are associated with them. We created Feldspar, the first system that fully supports this associative retrieval of personal information on the computer. Feldspar's contributions include (1) an intuitive user interface that allows users to find information by interactively and incrementally specifying multiple levels of associations as retrieval queries, such as: "find the file from the person who I met at an event in May"; and (2) algorithms for collecting the association information and for providing answers to associative queries in real-time. A user study showed that Feldspar is easy to use, and suggested that it might be faster than conventional browsing and searching for these kinds of retrieval tasks. Feldspar could be an important addition to search and browsing tools.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2008
1870 pages
ISBN:9781605580111
DOI:10.1145/1357054
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 April 2008

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Author Tags

  1. associative information retrieval
  2. personal information management
  3. user interfaces

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CHI '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 157 of 714 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)MeMemo: On-device Retrieval Augmentation for Private and Personalized Text GenerationProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657662(2765-2770)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Pick, Click, Flick!undefinedOnline publication date: 14-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Desktop Search EnginesProtecting User Privacy in Web Search Utilization10.4018/978-1-6684-6914-9.ch004(63-96)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2023
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  • (2021)Data Comparison and Study of Behavioural Pattern to Reduce the Latency Problem in Mobile Applications and Operating SystemMobile Computing and Sustainable Informatics10.1007/978-981-16-1866-6_49(687-692)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2021
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