Taxonomies organize knowledge into hierarchical structures that support effective information seeking behaviors. However, developing taxonomies in fast-evolving domains like e-commerce remains a labor-intensive process. In this paper, we present an interactive system that assists users in expanding taxonomies through automated knowledge discovery from large text corpora. On the back end, our hybrid methods combine topic modeling and large language models (LLMs) to uncover emerging concepts, generate concise summaries, and suggest mappings to taxonomy nodes. On the front end, we develop an interactive web-based interface that supports iterative, human-in-the-loop taxonomy expansion. We demonstrate the system’s versatility through two scenarios using publicly available datasets: amplifying a preliminary taxonomy in the e-commerce domain and refining a mature taxonomy in the medical domain.

Information continuously evolves over time. Because of this dynamic nature, time becomes a fundamental dimension that shapes how we extract, retrieve, interpret, and reason about knowledge. As information systems are constantly updated, models must determine not only what is relevant, but also when that information is valid. This tutorial provides a structured and in-depth overview of the complete temporal information access pipeline: Temporal Information Extraction (TIE), Temporal Information Retrieval (TIR), and Temporal Question Answering (TQA). We examine the progression of temporal methods from early rule-based extraction and probabilistic retrieval to contemporary transformer-based and large language model (LLM) architectures. Participants gain a solid understanding of the core principles underlying the identification and normalization of time expressions, time-aware document ranking, and temporal reasoning in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The tutorial concludes with a discussion of open challenges and future research directions aimed at building AI systems that are temporally aware, robust, and adaptive. By connecting classical extraction and IR foundations with modern LLM-based reasoning, this tutorial presents a cohesive and up-to-date perspective on temporal information systems.

There has been considerable work on Academic Search. Academic Search is widely used; in addition to recommending papers to read, authors need to find papers they should cite, and program committees and funding agencies need to assign submissions to reviewers that are well-informed and sympathetic to the topic area. High-quality recommendations impact reviews, publication quality, and move a field into new directions.

Veracity is a critical dimension of data quality that directly impacts a wide range of tasks. In entity search scenarios, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) such as DBpedia and Wikidata serve as core resources for accessing factual content. The veracity of these KGs is therefore essential for ensuring the reliability and trustworthiness of retrieved entities -- factors that directly influence user confidence in the search system. However, ensuring the truthfulness of entities remains a major challenge due to the complexities associated with the scale, development, and maintenance of KGs.

In e-commerce, customers often struggle to find relevant items when their needs involve subjective properties characterized by personal or collective perception, tastes, and opinions, which are typically not captured in catalog data. This challenge is particularly pronounced in event-based scenarios like gifting, where selecting the right product involves complex subjective reasoning. Customer reviews can be a valuable source of subjective information to bridge this gap. Consequently, customers often spend significant amount of time navigating multiple products and reading numerous reviews to find suitable gifts that meet their needs. In order to reduce the effort involved, we propose an agentic approach driven by large language models to streamline this process by autonomously executing various user actions. These include computational tasks like vagueness detection and subjective product needs extraction, conversational interactions to gather missing user information, and web browsing actions that search for product details, reviews, and review images. Additionally, the agent employs generative actions to synthesize gifting ideas and explanations, helping users discover suitable products more efficiently. The proposed approach not only reduces the cognitive burden on users but also facilitates the exploration of a wider range of products. Our solution highlights the potential of autonomous agents to handle subjective queries in e-commerce, enhancing personalization, product exploration, and selection in a user-centric manner.

Events like Valentine's Day and Christmas can influence user intent when interacting with search engines. For example, a user searching for gift around Valentine's Day is likely to be looking for Valentine's-themed options, whereas the same query close to Christmas would more likely suggest an interest in Holiday-themed gifts. These shifts in user intent, driven by temporal factors, are often implicit but important to determine the relevance of search results. In this demo, we explore how incorporating temporal awareness can enhance search relevance in an e-commerce setting. We constructed a database of 2K events and, using historical purchase data, developed a temporal model that estimates each event's importance on a specific date. The most relevant events on the date the query was issued are then used to enrich search results with event-specific items. Our demo illustrates how this approach enables a search system to better adapt to temporal nuances, ultimately delivering more contextually relevant products.

To help customers who are still in the exploration phase, Web search engines and e-commerce websites often provide relevant Q&As in widgets, such as ‘People Also Ask’ and ‘Customers Also Ask Alexa’, with additional information. In this work, we propose to enrich this customer experience by rendering related products under each Q&A based on an automated online query recommendation. We define what are the tenets for high-quality query recommendations and explain why this challenge is different from the existing query re-writing, query expansion and keyphrase generation methods. We describe a data collection method which uses customer co-click information on a proprietary website in order to successfully guide our model into generating query recommendations that satisfy all tenets. Offline and online evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed approach generates superior query recommendations and brings much more customer engagement over strong baselines.

In this paper, we discuss the potential costs that emerge from using a Knowledge Graph (KG) in entity-oriented search without considering its data veracity. We argue for the need for KG veracity analysis to gain insights and propose a scalable assessment framework. Previous assessments focused on relevance, assuming correct KGs, and overlooking the potential risks of misinformation. Our approach strategically allocates annotation resources, optimizing utility and revealing the significant impact of veracity on entity search and card generation. Contributions include a fresh perspective on entity-oriented search extending beyond the conventional focus on relevance, a scalable assessment framework, exploratory experiments highlighting the impact of veracity on ranking and user experience, as well as outlining associated challenges and opportunities.

We present Event-focused Search, an automated and scalable pipeline designed to facilitate event discovery and enhance event-based search. This is done by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to populate event datasets, perform temporal search based on selected dates, and aggregate search results based on appropriate events based on those searches. We illustrate this pipeline through proof-of-concept interfaces in an e-commerce context, though such a framework is applicable to different types of search scenarios (e.g., sports, entertainment).

Deep nets such as GPT are at the core of the current advances in many systems and applications. Things are moving fast; techniques become obsolete quickly (within weeks). How can we take advantage of new discoveries and incorporate them into our existing work? Are new developments radical improvements, or incremental repetitions of established concepts, or combinations of both?

Deep nets such as GPT are at the core of the current advances in many systems and applications. Things are moving very fast, and it appears that techniques are out of date within weeks. How can we take advantage of new discoveries and incorporate them into our existing work? Are these radical new developments, repetitions of older concepts, or both?

This work presents CoreKB, a Web platform for searching reliable facts over gene expression-cancer associations Knowledge Base (KB). It provides search capabilities over an RDF graph using natural language queries, structured facets, and autocomplete. CoreKB is designed to be intuitive and easy to use for healthcare professionals, medical researchers, and clinicians. The system offers the user a comprehensive overview of the scientific evidence supporting a medical fact. It provides a quantitative comparison between the possible gene-cancer associations a particular fact can reflect.

This paper presents a slot-filling retrieval application, ClozeSearch, for searching collocates to assist users in scientific writing. ClozeSearch suggests plausible collocates to fill in user-created slots within the query text. To ease the query formulation, we adapt the autocomplete feature to a slot-filling fashion of querying. Given a query prefix with slots, we select multiple valid terms to replace each slot and then provide complete suggestions based on such hypothetical prefixes. To reduce the search space for sampling the terms, we leveraged histogram pruning. Moreover, we propose two alternatives based on syntactic graph and deep language model for better flexibility in coping with long queries. Experimental results show that our proposed methods outperform the conventional pattern-based matching by a maximum of 0.18 points in F1-score.

When annotators label data, a key metric for quality assurance is inter-annotator agreement (IAA): the extent to which annotators agree on their labels. Though many IAA measures exist for simple categorical and ordinal labeling tasks, relatively little work has considered more complex labeling tasks, such as structured, multi-object, and free-text annotations. Krippendorff’s α, best known for use with simpler labeling tasks, does have a distance-based formulation with broader applicability, but little work has studied its efficacy and consistency across complex annotation tasks.

We present SKG Explorer, an application for querying and browsing a social knowledge graph derived from Twitter that contains relationships between entities, links, and topics. A temporal dimension is also added for generating timelines for well-known events that allows the construction of stories in a wiki-like style. In this paper we describe the main components of the system and showcase some examples.

Social data is a rich data source for identifying trends and topics of interest based on user activity. Social data also provides opportunities to collect numerical data about events like elections, sport games, disasters or economic news. We propose the problem of identifying relevant quantitative information from social data as annotations for a topic. We investigate how to extract quantitative information and perform a number of experiments and analysis with Twitter data.

Microblogging platforms such as Twitter provide low cost access to an immense reserve of authoritative professionals, opinion leaders and hobbyists for a wide range of topics. Yet, as microposts are short and incredibly diverse, many of these experts are hidden. In this paper, we present e#, a system to retrieve experts automatically for a given set of keywords. Our design targets exhaustivity: e# can detect previously undetectable experts. The core idea is to enhance a state-ofthe-art expert detection algorithm with a graph of expertise domains. Our system produces this graph from hundreds of Gigabytes of Web search query logs and behavioral data, processed in a distributed, parallel fashion. We provide a detailed description of our architecture, including an original SQL-based community detection algorithm. We then benchmark our system with 750 queries, using crowdsourcing. We observe that e# finds many more experts than a state-of-the-art baseline.

In this position paper, we take the experimental approach of putting algorithms aside, and reflect on what recommenders would be for people if they were not tied to technology. By looking at some of the shortcomings that current recommenders have fallen into and discussing their limitations from a human point of view, we ask the question: if freed from all limitations, what should, and what could, RecSys be? We then turn to the idea that life itself is the best recommender system, and that people themselves are the query. By looking at how life brings people in contact with options that suit their needs or match their preferences, we hope to shed further light on what current RecSys could be doing better. Finally, we look at the forms that RecSys could take in the future. By formulating our vision beyond the reach of usual considerations and current limitations, including business models, algorithms, data sets, and evaluation methodologies, we attempt to arrive at fresh conclusions that may inspire the next steps taken by the community of researchers working on RecSys.

Crowdsourcing has been part of the IR toolbox as a cheap and fast mechanism to obtain labels for system development and evaluation. Successful deployment of crowdsourcing at scale involves adjusting many variables, a very important one being the number of workers needed per human intelligence task (HIT). We consider the crowdsourcing task of learning the answer to simple multiple-choice HITs, which are representative of many relevance experiments. In order to provide statistically significant results, one often needs to ask multiple workers to answer the same HIT. A stopping rule is an algorithm that, given a HIT, decides for any given set of worker answers to stop and output an answer or iterate and ask one more worker. In contrast to other solutions that try to estimate worker performance and answer at the same time, our approach assumes the historical performance of a worker is known and tries to estimate the HIT difficulty and answer at the same time. The difficulty of the HIT decides how much weight to give to each worker's answer. In this paper we investigate how to devise better stopping rules given workers' performance quality scores. We suggest adaptive exploration as a promising approach for scalable and automatic creation of ground truth. We conduct a data analysis on an industrial crowdsourcing platform, and use the observations from this analysis to design new stopping rules that use the workers' quality scores in a non-trivial manner. We then perform a number of experiments using real-world datasets and simulated data, showing that our algorithm performs better than other approaches.

I propose to look at information retrieval applications from the perspective of the data stack infrastructure that is needed in research prototypes and production systems.

While location-based social networks (LBSNs) have become widely used for sharing and consuming location information, a large number of users turn to general web search engines for recreational activity ideas. In these cases, users typically express a query combining desired activity type, constraints and suitability, around an explicit location and time -- for example, "parks for kids in NYC in winter", or "cheap bars for bachelor party in san francisco". In this work we characterize such queries as recreational queries, and propose a relevance framework for ranking points of interest (POIs) to present in the web search recreational vertical using signals from query logs and LBSNs. The first part of this framework is a taxonomy of recreational intents, which we derive from those previously seen in query logs and other behavioral data. Based on the most popular recreational intents, we proceed to outline a new relevance model combining social, geographical and temporal information. We implement a prototype and conduct a preliminary user-study evaluation. Results show the proposed relevance model and bundles greatly improve user satisfaction for recreational queries.

In 2012, Sogou, a major Chinese web search engine released a large-scale query log containing 43.5M user interactions, including submitted queries and clicked web page search results. This query log offers a deep sample of queries over a two day period from 30th December 2011 to 1st January 2012. In August 2013, we identified 1.4M predominantly Chinese language unique search result URLs that were clicked at least three times in this query log. We crawled the HTML content of these URLs to construct the supplementary SOGOU-2012-CRAWL dataset, which we release in this work. A real large-scale query log with accompanying crawl such as this offers several opportunities for reproducible information retrieval (IR) research, including query classification, intent modelling and indexing strategy. In this paper we first detail the query log and crawl dataset construction and characteristics. Following this, to demonstrate potential applications we use the crawl to indicatively analyse various time-based patterns in web content and search behaviour. In particular, we study the distribution of language-independent date expressions in the crawled web content. Based on this, we propose a simple approach for modelling the past/present/future temporal intent of queries based on the date the query was submitted by the user, and the dates appearing in the clicked search results. We observe several prominent temporal patterns which may lead to novel time-aware IR approaches.

No abstract available.

Information retrieval researchers and engineers use human computation as a mechanism to produce labeled data sets for product development, research and experimentation. To gather useful results, a successful labeling task relies on many different elements: clear instructions, user interface guidelines, representative high-quality datasets, appropriate inter-rater agreement metrics, work quality checks, and channels for worker feedback. Furthermore, designing and implementing tasks that produce and use several thousands or millions of labels is different than conducting small scale research investigations. In this paper we present a perspective for collecting high quality labels with an emphasis on practical problems and scalability. We focus on three main topics: programming crowds, debugging tasks with low agreement, and algorithms for quality control. We show examples from an industrial setting.

Modern Web data is highly structured in terms of entities and relations from large knowledge resources, geo-temporal references and social network structure, resulting in a massive multidimensional graph. This graph essentially unifies both the searcher and the information resources that played a fundamentally different role in traditional IR, and "Graph Search" offers major new ways to access relevant information. Graph search affects both query formulation (complex queries about entities and relations building on the searcher's context) as well as result exploration and discovery (slicing and dicing the information using the graph structure) in a completely personalized way. This new graph based approach introduces great opportunities, but also great challenges, in terms of data quality and data integration, user interface design, and privacy. We view the notion of "graph search" as searching information from your personal point of view (you are the query) over a highly structured and curated information space. This goes beyond the traditional two-term queries and ten blue links results that users are familiar with, requiring a highly interactive session covering both query formulation and result exploration. The workshop attracted a range of researchers working on this and related topics, and made concrete progress working together on one of the greatest challenges in the years to come.

There is an increasing amount of structure on the Web as a result of modern Web languages, user tagging and annotation, emerging robust NLP tools, and an ever growing volume of linked data. These meaningful, semantic, annotations hold the promise to significantly enhance information access, by enhancing the depth of analysis of today's systems. The goal of the ESAIR'14 workshop remains to advance the general research agenda on this core problem, with an explicit focus on one of the most challenging aspects to address in the coming years. The main remaining challenge is on the user's side - the potential of rich document annotations can only be realized if matched by more articulate queries exploiting these powerful retrieval cues - and a more dynamic approach is emerging by exploiting new forms of query autosuggest. How can the query suggestion paradigm be used to encourage searcher to articulate longer queries, with concepts and relations linking their statement of request to existing semantic models? How do entity results and social network data in "graph search" change the classic division between searchers and information and lead to extreme personalization - are you the query? How to leverage transaction logs and recommendation, and how adaptive should we make the system? What are the privacy ramifications and the UX aspects - how to not creep out users?

We consider the crowdsourcing task of learning the answer to simple multiple-choice microtasks. In order to provide statistically significant results, one often needs to ask multiple workers to answer the same microtask. A stopping rule is an algorithm that for a given microtask decides for any given set of worker answers if the system should stop and output an answer or iterate and ask one more worker. A quality score for a worker is a score that reflects the historic performance of that worker. In this paper we investigate how to devise better stopping rules given such quality scores. We conduct a data analysis on a large-scale industrial crowdsourcing platform, and use the observations from this analysis to design new stopping rules that use the workers’ quality scores in a non-trivial manner. We then conduct a simulation based on a real-world workload, showing that our algorithm performs better than the more naive approaches.

Modern social networks such as Twitter provide a platform for people to express their opinions on a variety of topics ranging from personal to global. While the factual part of this information and the opinions of various experts are archived by sources such as Wikipedia and reputable news articles, the opinion of the general public is drowned out in a sea of noise and “un-interesting” information. In this demo we present Kondenzer - an offline system for condensing, archiving and visualizing social data. Specifically, we create digests of social data using a combination of filtering, duplicate removal and efficient clustering. This gives a condensed set of high quality data which is used to generate facets and create a collection that can be visualized using the PivotViewer control.

Recommender systems take into account a wide range of information about both an individual user and other user's preferences in order to provide relevant content. However, one source of information that appears to be under-utilized is contextual information about the users' trajectory: where they are currently located, and where they are traveling to. We demonstrate a system that recommends the reading order of Twitter content based on the user's planned travel.

A query log is a key asset in a commercial search engine. Everyday millions of users rely on search engines to find information on the Web by entering a few keywords on a simple search interface. Those queries represent a subset of user behavioral data which is used to mine and discover search patterns for improving the overall end user experience. While queries are very useful, it is not always possible to capture precisely what the user was looking for when the intent is not that clear. We explore a different alternative based on human computation to gather a bit more information from users and show the type of query log that would be possible to construct.

Time plays a central role in many web search information needs relating to recent events. For recency queries where fresh information is most desirable, there is likely to be a great deal of highly-relevant information created very recently by crowds of people across the world, particularly on platforms such as Wikipedia and Twitter. With so many users, mainstream events are often very quickly reflected in these sources. The English Wikipedia encyclopedia consists of a vast collection of user-edited articles covering a range of topics. During events, users collaboratively create and edit existing articles in near real-time. Simultaneously, users on Twitter disseminate and discuss event details, with a small number of users becoming influential for the topic.

The first computers were people. Today, Internet-based access to 24/7 online human crowds has led to a renaissance of research in human computation and the advent of crowdsourcing. These new opportunities have brought a disruptive shift to research and practice for how we build intelligent systems today. Not only can labeled data for training and evaluation be collected faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before, but we now see human computation being integrated into the systems themselves, operating in concert with automation. This tutorial introduces opportunities and challenges of human computation and crowdsourcing, particularly for search evaluation and developing hybrid search solutions that integrate human computation with traditional forms of automated search. We review methodology and findings of recent research and survey current generation crowdsourcing platforms now available, analyzing methods, potential, and limitations across platforms.

Social features are increasingly integrated within the search results page of the main commercial search engines. There is, however, little understanding of the utility of social features in traditional search. In this paper, we study utility in the context of social annotations, which are markings indicating that a person in the social network of the user has liked or shared a result document. We introduce a taxonomy of social relevance aspects that influence the utility of social annotations in search, spanning query classes, the social network, and content relevance. We present the results of a user study quantifying the utility of social annotations and the interplay between social relevance aspects. Through the user study we gain insights on conditions under which social annotations are most useful to a user. Finally, we present machine learned models for predicting the utility of a social annotation using the user study judgments as an optimization criterion. We model the learning task with features drawn from web usage logs, and show empirical evidence over real-world head and tail queries that the problem is learnable and that in many cases we can predict the utility of a social annotation.

There is an increasing amount of structure on the Web as a result of modern Web languages, user tagging and annotation, and emerg- ing robust NLP tools. These meaningful, semantic, annotations hold the promise to significantly enhance information access, by enhancing the depth of analysis of today's systems. Currently, we have only started exploring the possibilities and only begin to un- derstand how these valuable semantic cues can be put to fruitful use. Unleashing the potential of semantic annotations requires us to think outside the box, by combining the insights of natural lan- guage processing (NLP) to go beyond bags of words, the insights of databases (DB) to use structure efficiently even when aggregating over millions of records, the insights of information retrieval (IR) in effective goal-directed search and evaluation, and the insights of knowledge management (KM) to get grips on the greater whole. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from these dif- ferent disciplines and work together on one of the greatest chal- lenges in the years to come. The desired result of the workshop will be to gain concrete insight into the potential of semantic an- notations, and in concrete steps to take this research forward; to synchronize related research happening in NLP, DB, IR, and KM, in ways that combine the strengths of each discipline; and to have a lively, interactive workshop where every participant contributes actively and which inspires attendees to think freely and creatively, working towards a common goal.

Crowdsourcing has emerged in recent years as a promising new avenue for leveraging today's digitally-connected, diverse, distributed workforce. Generally speaking, crowdsourcing describes outsourcing of tasks to a large group of people instead of assigning such tasks to an in-house employee or contractor. Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower have gained particular attention as active online market places for reaching and tapping into this still largely under-utilized workforce. Crowdsourcing also offers intriguing new opportunities for accomplishing different kinds of tasks or achieving broader participation than previously possible, as well as completing standard tasks more accurately in less time and at lower cost. Unlocking the potential of crowdsourcing in practice, however, requires a tri-partite understanding of principles, platforms, and best practices. We will introduce the opportunities and challenges of crowdsourcing while discussing the three issues above. This will provide a basic foundation to begin crowdsourcing in the context of one's own particular tasks

Crowdsourcing has emerged in recent years as an exciting new avenue for leveraging the tremendous potential and resources of today's digitally-connected, diverse, distributed workforce. Generally speaking, crowdsourcing describes outsourcing of tasks to a large group of people instead of assigning such tasks to an in-house employee or contractor. Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower have gained particular attention as active online market places for reaching and tapping into this glut of a still largely under-utilized workforce.

Time is an important dimension of any information space and can be very useful in information retrieval and in particular clustering and exploration of search results. Search result clustering is a feature integrated in some of today's search engines, allowing users to further explore search results. However, only little work has been done on exploiting temporal information embedded in documents for the presentation, clustering, and exploration of search results along well-defined timelines. In this paper, we present an add-on to traditional information retrieval applications in which we exploit various temporal information associated with documents to present and cluster documents along timelines. Temporal information expressed in the form of, e.g., date and time tokens or temporal references, appear in documents as part of the textual context or metadata. Using temporal entity extraction techniques, we show how temporal expressions are made explicit and used in the construction of multiple-granularity timelines. We discuss how hit-list based search results can be clustered according to temporal aspects, anchored in the constructed timelines, and how time-based document clusters can be used to explore search results that include temporal snippets. We also outline a prototypical implementation and evaluation that demonstrates the feasibility and functionality of our framework.

We discuss the concept of relevance criteria in the context of e-Commerce search. A vast body of research literature describes the beyond-topical criteria used to determine the relevance of the document to the need. We argue that in an e-Commerce scenario there are some differences, and novel and different criteria can be used to determine relevance. We experimentally validate this hypothesis by means of Amazon Mechanical Turk using a crowdsourcing approach.

As software evolves over time, the identification of expertise becomes an important problem. Component ownership and team awareness of such ownership are signals of solid project. Ownership and ownership awareness are also issues in open-source software (OSS) projects. Indeed, the membership in OSS projects is dynamic with team members arriving and leaving. In large open source projects, specialists who know the system very well are considered experts. How can one identify the experts in a project by mining a particular repository like the source code? Have they gotten help from other people?

A major component of sense-making is organizing--grouping, labeling, and summarizing--the data at hand in order to form a useful mental model, a necessary precursor to identifying missing information and to reasoning about the data. Previous work has shown the Scatter/Gather model to be useful in exploratory activities that occur when users encounter unknown document collections. However, the topic structure communicated by Scatter/Gather is closely tied to the behavior of the underlying clustering algorithm; this structure may not reflect the mental model most applicable to the information need. In this paper we describe the initial design of a mixed-initiative information structuring tool that leverages aspects of the well-studied Scatter/Gather model but permits the user to impose their own desired structure when necessary.

No abstract available.

Clustering of search results is an important feature in many of today's information retrieval applications. The notion of hit list clustering appears in Web search engines and enterprise search engines as a mechanism that allows users to further explore the coverage of a query. However, there has been little work on exposing temporal attributes for constructing and presentation of clusters. These attributes appear in documents as part of the textual content, e.g., as a date and time token or as a temporal reference in a sentence. In this paper, we outline a model and describe a prototype that shows the main ideas.

It is well understood that the key for successful Semantic Web applications depends on the availability of machine understandable meta-data. We describe the Information Grid, a practical approach to the Semantic Web, and show a prototype implementation. Information grid resources span all the data in the organization and all the metadata required to make it meaningful. The final goal is to let organizations view their assets in a smooth continuum from the Internet to the Intranet, with uniform semantically rich access.

We analyze the dependency problem of the user interface with the information retrieval software. Our approach allows the separation of the user interface from the retrieval component. This is useful when the user wants to select an interface or visualization metaphor that could not always be available for different information retrieval systems. We present a model for visualizing large collections of documents in World Wide Web retrieval, independently of the retrieval system. We describe a software architecture that could be used to implement a solution in an intranet or Internet environment. Our proposal allows to ease the use of visualization tools which partially solve the problem of data overload on the Internet.