Same query - different results? A study of repeat queries in search sessions

Typically, three main query reformulation types in sessions are considered: generalization, specication, and drift. We show that given the full context of user interactions, repeat queries represent an important reformulation type which should also be addressed in session retrieval evaluation. We investigate dierent query reformulation patterns in logs from The European Library. Using an automatic classification for query reformulations, we found that the most frequent (and presumably the most important) reformulation pattern corresponds to repeat queries. We aim to nd possible explanations for repeat queries in sessions and try to uncover implications for session retrieval evaluation

A study of search intermediary working notes: implications for IR system design

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study investigating working notes created during encoding and external storage (EES) processes, by human search intermediates using a Boolean information retrieval (JR) system. EES processes have been an important area of research in educational contexts where students create and use notes to facilitate learning. In the context of interactive IR, encoding can be conceptualized as the process of creating working notes to help in the understanding and translating a user's information problem into a search strategy suitable for use with an IR system. External storage is the process of using working notes to facilitate interaction with IR systems. Analysis of 221 sets of working notes created by human search intermediaries revealed extensive use of EES processes and the creation of working notes of textual, numerical and graphical entities. Nearly 70% of recorded working notes were textual/numerical entities, nearly 30% were graphical entities and 0.73% were indiscernible. Segmentation devices were also used in 48% of the working notes. The creation of working notes during EES processes was a fundamental element within the mediated, interactive IR process. Implications for the design of IR interfaces to support users' EES processes and further research is discussed

An interactive two-dimensional approach to query aspects rewriting in systematic reviews. IMS unipd at CLEF eHealth task 2

International audienc

Building a terminology network for search: the KoMoHe project

The paper reports about results on the GESIS-IZ project "Competence Center Modeling and Treatment of Semantic Heterogeneity" (KoMoHe). KoMoHe supervised a terminology mapping effort, in which 'cross-concordances' between major controlled vocabularies were organized, created and managed. In this paper we describe the establishment and implementation of cross-concordances for search in a digital library (DL).Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure, Dublin Core Conference 200

Query expansion using medical information extraction for improving information retrieval in French medical domain

Many users’ queries contain references to named entities, and this is particularly true in the medical field. Doctors express their information needs using medical entities as they are elements rich with information that helps to better target the relevant documents. At the same time, many resources have been recognized as a large container of medical entities and relationships between them such as clinical reports; which are medical texts written by doctors. In this paper, we present a query expansion method that uses medical entities and their semantic relations in the query context based on an external resource in OWL. The goal of this method is to evaluate the effectiveness of an information retrieval system to support doctors in accessing easily relevant information. Experiments on a collection of real clinical reports show that our approach reveals interesting improvements in precision, recall and MAP in medical information retrieval

User - Thesaurus Interaction in a Web-Based Database: An Evaluation of Users' Term Selection Behaviour

A major challenge faced by users during the information search and retrieval process is the selection of search terms for query formulation and expansion. Thesauri are recognised as one source of search terms which can assist users in query construction and expansion. As the number of electronic thesauri attached to information retrieval systems has grown, a range of interface facilities and features have been developed to aid users in formulating their queries. The pilot study reported here aimed to explore and evaluate how a thesaurus-enhanced search interface assisted end-users in selecting search terms. Specifically, it focused on the evaluation of users' attitudes toward both the thesaurus and its interface as tools for facilitating search term selection for query expansion. Thesaurusbased searching and browsing behaviours adopted by users while interacting with a thesaurus-enhanced search interface were also examined

Dynamic Vs Static Term-Expansion using Semantic Resources in Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval in a Telugu language is upcoming area of research. Telugu is one of the recognized Indian languages. We present a novel approach in reformulating item terms at the time of crawling and indexing. The idea is not new, but use of synset and other lexical resources in Indian languages context has limitations due to unavailability of language resources. We prepared a synset for 1,43,001 root words out of 4,83,670 unique words from training corpus of 3500 documents during indexing. Index time document expansion gave improved recall ratio, when compared to base line approach i.e. simple information retrieval without term expansion at both the ends. We studied the effect of query terms expansion at search time using synset and compared with simple information retrieval process without expansion, recall is greatly affected and improved. We further extended this work by expanding terms in two sides and plotted results, which resemble recall growth. Surprisingly all expansions are showing improvement in recall and little fall in precision. We argue that expansion of terms at any level may cause inverse effect on precision. Necessary care is required while expanding documents or queries with help of language resources like Synset, WordNet and other resources