Deciphering cluster representations

摘要

There are several recent studies that propose search output clustering as an alternative representation method to ranked output. Users are provided with cluster representations instead of lists of titles and invited to make decisions on groups of documents. This paper discusses the difficulties involved in representing clusters for users’ evaluation in a concise but easily interpretable form. The discussion is based on findings and user feedback from a user study investigating the effectiveness of search output clustering. The overall impression created by the experiment results and users’ feedback is that clusters cannot be relied on to consistently produce meaningful document groups that can easily be recognised by the users. They also seem to lead to unrealistic user expectations.