Enhancing the interface for ontology-supported homonym search

Keyword-based search engines face a complication when a search term is a homonym, that is, a word with multiple meanings. In a pervious study, we have built an Ontology-Supported Web Search system to categorize the homonymous terms and display their suggested completions separately. The suggestions of the homonyms are extracted from an ontology developed in this research. In this paper, we present new ways of displaying homonymous search results. To help the user better understand and differentiate the homonymous terms, we display snippets of search results belonging to the suggested completions separately as follows. For every homonymous sense, the snippets are in a separate pane, and panes are tiled horizontally, i.e., are next to each other. In addition, we present an improvement of Google's instant feature, in that snippets are refreshed as soon as a user hovers with the mouse on a suggested completion for more than a certain period, e.g. two seconds.