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Dissertation Information for Wanda Pratt

NAME:
- Wanda Pratt
- (Alias) Wanda Marie Pratt

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Computer Science

SCHOOL:
- Stanford University (USA) (1999)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected

Title: Dynamic categorization: A method for decreasing information overload

Abstract: "Search results can be overwhelming. When people use computer-based tools to find answers to general questions, they often are faced with a daunting list of search results or ""hits"" returned by the search engine. Many search tools address this problem by helping users to make their searches more specific. However, when dozens or hundreds of documents are relevant to their question, users need tools that help them to explore and to understand their search results, rather than ones that eliminate a portion of those results.

I have developed a new approach, called dynamic categorization, that addresses this problem by automatically organizing search results into meaningful groups that correspond to the user's query. This approach uses knowledge of important kinds of queries and a model of the domain terminology to generate a hierarchical categorization of search results. I created a tool called DynaCat that implements this approach for the domain of medicine, where the amount of information in the primary medical literature alone is overwhelming. DynaCat summarizes the documents returned from a search by organizing them into an intuitive and useful hierarchy of categories, thus helping patients as well as health-care workers to gain quick and easy access to important medical information.

I evaluated my thesis work in two ways. The technical evaluation demonstrated that the categorization generated by DynaCat was about as consistent with the physicians' categorizations as the physicians' categorizations were with each other. These results suggest that DynaCat creates reasonable document categories and assigns documents to categories appropriately. In the usefulness evaluation, I showed that breast cancer patients and their family members could find more answers in a fixed amount of time, and were more satisfied with their search experience when they used DynaCat than when they used either the cluster tool or the ranking tool. These differences were statistically significant ( p < 0.05). Users thought that DynaCat helped them to find answers easily and quickly, and to learn about the information related to their query. They indicated that DynaCat provided an organization of search results that was clear, easy to use, accurate, precise, and helpful."

MPACT Scores for Wanda Pratt

A = 3
C = 0
A+C = 3
T = 3
G = 1
W = 3
TD = 3
TA = 0
calculated 2012-08-14 18:13:55

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