Computational Tools for Document Retrieval

This paper reports on an ongoing project to investigate the extraction of information from large scientific data bases. Two major problems in this area are size of potential retrieval sets and the complex interrelationships among query or components. This research project aims to develop visual based tools to directly address these problems. specifically, the tools were developed to assist the user in the query formulation and retrieval analysis phases.. several visual tools and techniques that were developed to assist a user in the information retrieval process are presented and discussed.The tools developed range from displays of how retrieval terms are interrelated and change over time to a tool for visualizing the results of retrievals. This retrieval visualization method has been implemented through a visualization system, called VIBE