A graphical user interface for the retrieval of hierarchically structured documents

Past research has proved that graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can significantly improve the effectiveness of the information access task. Our work is based on the consideration that structured document retrieval requires different user graphical interfaces from standard information retrieval. In structured document retrieval a GUI has to enable a user to query, browse retrieved documents, provide query refinement and relevance feedback based not only on full documents, but also on specific document parts in relation to the document structure. In this paper, we present a new GUI for structured document retrieval specifically designed for hierarchically structured documents. A user task-oriented evaluation has shown that the proposed interface provides the user with an intuitive and powerful set of tools for structured document searching, retrieved list navigation, and search refinement.