[Discussion] Provide Explanation for Result

[chseifert]

Users often face the problem that it can't be easily seen why a certain result popped up for an initial query. With each result also the query for the specific provider is returned. We could show the query that was used to retrieve the results (this might differ for different providers) and highlight the query terms in the result list. (Got the idea because mgrani implemented it in jarvis, see screenshot)

interaction either: mouse over -> details or a little icon "explain"

[mgrani]

I agree, but there is more to consider:

1. Partner systems might search in all fields THEY have and do not explain where they found a particular item.
2. Partner system might use stemming or even morphological analysis. So simple string matching won't work
3. The federated recommender uses query expansion and hence provides more terms.

My proposal for 1. would be to limit the fields searched by the partner systems to those fields also to be displayed in the recommender. Further i suggest implementing methods for searching for time ranges or other specific metadata.

For 2. we need to discuss whether partner recommenders can be extended such that they provide a result summary as we know it from IR Systems

Fro 3. the federated recommender would need to give us back the expanded query. But i guess this is already the case.

[mgrani]

Another comment: i am not sure that the + is used correctly in the query language. + usually means 'word must be contained in the document'. Hence Ada +programming+language means that programming and language must be contained in the document.

[chseifert]

Asked the recommender people for interpretation of the query in issue EEXCESS/recommender#12