Complementary menu system combining document structure and taxonomic hierarchy

摘要

The users of conventional menu systems for information rretrieval, sometimes choose wrong items or hestiate to choose one menu item among the items listed. To suppress these faulty actions, we propose a menu system named "Complementary Menu System" which combines two different types of menus systems, one based on the compositional structure of the document and the other based on based on the taxonomic hierarchy of a thesaurus. We have developed this menu system and conducted an experiment to evaluate the effects of the combination. The experiments showed that the complementary menus system scieves higher precision than the component menu systems. The interview of users and the log analysis suggest the combination gives different clues and more useful information for retrieval for users because each component menu system compensates the lack of information of the other with one's information.