A cluster manipulation paradigm for mobile web search interaction

This paper describes a new interaction paradigm well suited to perform web searches though a mobile device. The prototypal system that implements this novel interaction framework is named Matrioshka, that is a multi-modal system. In this paper we focus on the interaction framework and will introduce briefly an overview of the mobile version of Matrioshka. This framework is based on cluster manipulation operations. The results of a user request, yielded by one or more search engines, are organized into labelled clusters. Then, some manipulation operators can be applied to rerank clusters or to combine them to generate new clusters. These facilities allow the user to capture the relevant documents hidden in the large set of retrieved ones in the first ranked clusters. Copyright owned by the authors.