Exposure to ideas in domains outside a scientist's own may benefit her in reformulating existing research problems in novel ways and discovering new application domains for existing solution ideas. While improved performance in scholarly search engines can help scientists efficiently identify relevant advances in domains they may already be familiar with, it may fall short of helping them explore diverse ideas \textit{outside} such domains. In this paper we explore the design of systems aimed at augmenting the end-user ability in cross-domain exploration with flexible query specification. To this end, we develop an exploratory search system in which end-users can select a portion of text core to their interest from a paper abstract and retrieve papers that have a high similarity to the user-selected core aspect but differ in terms of domains. Furthermore, end-users can `zoom in' to specific domain clusters to retrieve more papers from them and understand nuanced differences within the clusters. Our case studies with scientists uncover opportunities and design implications for systems aimed at facilitating cross-domain exploration and inspiration.
翻译:接触科学家自身以外领域的想法可能有益于她以新的方式重新研究现有研究问题,并发现现有解决办法想法的新应用领域。虽然学术搜索引擎的改进能帮助科学家有效地查明他们可能已经熟悉的领域的相关进展,但可能不足以帮助他们探索不同的想法 \ textit{ outside} 此类领域。在本文件中,我们探索了旨在以灵活查询规格提高跨领域探索的最终用户能力的系统设计。为此,我们开发了一个探索性搜索系统,使最终用户能够从纸质抽象和检索与用户选择的核心方面高度相似但在领域方面差异很大的论文中选择符合其兴趣的文本核心部分。此外,终端用户可以“在”特定领域集群中“zoom”从它们那里检索更多的论文,并理解各组内部的细微差异。我们与科学家的案例研究揭示了各种机会,并设计了旨在促进跨领域探索和启发的系统所涉及的问题。