Memory Mimic Aids Reading
From: Technology Research News - 05/11/2005
By: Kimberly Patch

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) scientists have developed software that
mimics the human brain's mechanism for modeling words to expedite the process
of skimming or reading through digitized text. ScentHighlights helps ease the
cognitive burden of finding what a user is looking for by highlighting
portions of text relating to a series of user-supplied topics of interest.
"Users indicate their topics of interest by some method - user profile,
search keywords, clicking on words or index entries," says PARC researcher Ed
Chi. The system adds related topics to the mix, and from them extracts a list
of possibly relevant keywords; sentences containing keywords are highlighted
in yellow, and then user search terms are highlighted in pastels and related
keywords in gray. Studies demonstrated that people who used ScentHighlights
instead of poring through a paper book performed information-finding tasks
faster, and the next phase is to learn how the software changes the user's
eye movements through eye tracking analysis. ScentHighlights can interoperate
with ScentIndex, a tool that enables users to query the index of an
electronic book to retrieve a page of conceptually related index entries. The
research, which was partly funded by the Advanced Research Development
Agency, was detailed at the Intelligent User Interfaces Conference 2005 in
January. Chi says the ScentHighlights experiments fit into a new category of
human-computer interface research whose goal is to understand human behavior
as it relates to a scientific theory, and then apply that theory to the
improvement of user interfaces.  

Read the entire article at:
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/050405/Memory_mimic_aids_reading_050405.html

Links:
eBooks with indexes that reorganize conceptually
http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/publications/details.php?id=5089

Indexes Bolster eBook Search
http://www.ebook2u.com/ebooknews/IndexesBolstereBookSearch.shtml

ScentHighlights: highlighting conceptually-related sentences during reading
http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/publications/details.php?id=5444

Ed H. Chi
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/