BoW Search Tests

Welcome to the BoW Search Test

BoW is an experimental bibliography on the web, on the subject of parallel systems. An important feature is that everything is indexed to a hierarchical topic index. We have developed an automatic procedure to perform searches on this hierarchical index, and would appreciate your help in testing its effectiveness.

The goal of the tests is to help decide on various internal parameters of the search algorithm. The tests will be to conduct searches based on keywords and/or author names on all 4 test versions, and rank the results. In particular, a useful test is to search using your own name, and see whether the system identifies your research topics correctly. The versions are

Version 1 Version 2 Version 3 Version 4

The suggested procedure is to open them in distinct windows or tabs, and enter the same query to all of them. They will all give the same list of matching entries (yellow panel at right), but potentially different indications of related topics, as indicated by opening and emphasizing different branches of the topic tree (blue panel at left). The question is which of these is the best, in terms of opening the right topics and not opening wrong ones, and giving topics the right level of emaphsis (as reflected by the font size). You can click on the topics to see their contents and better evaluate their relevance.

Please feel free to conduct as many tests as you wish (hopefully at least one...). Send the results in an email to feit@cs.huji.ac.il stating the queries and your ranking of the test versions for each one. A simple evaluation uses the following 5-point scale:

  1. Totally off the mark
  2. Missed some topics, some extra topics
  3. OK, reasonable topics, could improve emphasis
  4. Good topics and emphasis, but some extra topics
  5. Excellent, exactly on the mark
if more than one version get the same evaluation but are nevertheless different, please try to rank them.

Any additional comments you may have are also welcome.

Thank you for your time!


For more information on BoW, and to browse the system, click here