A Preliminary Study on Multiple Documents Access via Mobile Devices

Current and upcoming use of mobile devices and services allows information to be provided anytime and anywhere while inherent constraints on mobile devices caused difficulties on mobile Internet access. In this paper, we first explore impact of human preferences on user interface for mobile Internet access with user preferences survey. It was found that commonly used features and access methodologies are often not the human preferred ones and vice versa. It was found that hierarchical document browsing interface is much preferred by human while most commonly used interfaces are list-based. Such a gap has probably resulted in difficulties on mobile Internet access. Thus, we further proposed and explored the feasibility on mobile web document access via concept hierarchies (i.e. hierarchical interface or HI). Our initial results showed that an unconventional combination of term frequency and inverse document frequency yielded similar performance (i.e. 71% ideal parent —child relationship) to previous work and the use of terms in titles achieved better performance than previous work (i.e. 82% ideal parent -child relationship). Our initial result of building concept hierarchies after clustering compared to that without is encouraging (c.f. 82% ideal parent -child relationship and 67% ideal parent -child relationship). We believe that HI can be enhanced to a level for commercial deployment for mobile Internet access.