Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

  
1. KWIC

retrieval results!KWIC KWIC keyword-in-context

A facility related to highlighting is the keyword-in-context (KWIC)  document surrogate. Sentence fragments, full sentences, or groups of sentences that contain query terms are extracted from the full text and presented for viewing along with other kinds of surrogate information (such as document title and abstract). Note that a KWIC listing is different than an abstract. An abstract summarizes the main topics of the document but might not contain references to the terms within the query. A KWIC extract shows sentences that summarize the ways the query terms are used within the document. This display can show not only which subsets of query terms occur in the retrieved documents, but also the context they appear in with respect to one another.

Tradeoff decisions must be made between how many lines of text to show and which lines to display. It is not known which contexts are best selected for viewing but results from text summarization research suggest that the best fragments to show are those that appear near the beginning of the document and that contain the largest subset of query terms [#!kupiec95!#]. If users have specified which terms are more important than others, then those fragments containing important terms should be shown before those that contain only less important terms. However, to help retain coherence of the excerpts, selected sentences should be shown in order of their occurrence in the original document, independent of how many search terms they contain.

The KWIC facility is usually not shown in Web search result display, most likely because the system must have a copy of the original document available from which to extract the sentences containing the search terms. Web search engines typically only retain the index without term position information. Systems that index individual Web sites can show KWIC information in the document list display.