Paper Reading #24: Have a say over what you see: evaluating interactive compression techniques

Comments
Evin Schuchardt
Luke Roberts

Reference Information
Title: Have a say over what you see: evaluating interactive compression techniques
Authors: Simon Tucker, Steve Whittaker
Presentation Venue: IUI 2009: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; February 8-11, 2009; Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

Summary
This paper discusses different Interactive Compression (IC) techniques to allow a user to remove information in documents they do not wish to see and making important information more visible.

The IC techniques they explore at different compression rates are:
1. Word Excision – remove unimportant words and replace them with periods
2. Utterance Excision – remove utterances (segments of de-emphasized information) and replace them with white space or an ellipsis for longer utterances
3. Highlighting Words – marking important words
4. Highlighting Utterances – marking important utterances
5. Keyword Context – use Utterance Excision but leave one word in place and grayed-out to let the user know the utterance is there
6. Fisheye View – split the screen into five views that display certain things such as important words, important utterances and segments of unmodified text

Taken from paper: Example of Word Excision

After doing an initial user study and finding that the two most successful IC techniques are Word Excision and Word Highlighting, they performed another more in-depth study on these two specific techniques.

Their results show that Word Excision and Word Highlighting allowed the users to extract the important information from documents more effectively even with the presence of an occasional error from the algorithm. Users were also found to prefer IC over unmodified text. There was no distinct preference for the level of compression used. It was different for each user. Word Excision allowed users to scan the document faster since words were omitted. For users who used Word Highlighting, they scanned the documents slower but did not lose any important information since nothing was omitted from the document.

Discussion
This paper was mostly about exploring current IC techniques. I can see it being referenced a lot in the future as other researchers delve deeper into this research topic. I think these different techniques could be very helpful. Personally, I would probably like the highlighting version the most, because it would allow me to still read information that is not highlighted if I want more information on a specific topic.

Recently I was assigned to read a paper about summarizing documents and now I had to read this one is about compressing the information provided. I think these areas of research go hand in hand and that the researchers could learn a lot by comparing their different findings and algorithms.

Areas of future study that researchers mention include improving their algorithms and IC techniques and exploring other ways to determine which parts of the document are important. They also want to test their system on other types of documents besides the type of documents used in these initial studies, documents from meetings.