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This paper describes the design of a direct manipulation user interface for Boolean information retrieval. Intended to overcome the difficulties of manipulating explicit Boolean queries as well as the “black box” drawbacks of so-called natural language query systems, the interface presents a two-dimensional graphical representation of a user's natural language query which not only exposes heuristic query transformations performed by the system, but also supports query reformulation by the user via direct manipulation of the representation. The paper illustrates the operation of the interface as implemented in the AI-STARS full-text information retrieval system.
Anick et al. (Fri,) studied this question.