An Investigation into Information Navigation via Diverse Keyword-based Facets

Abstract. In the age of information overload, it is necessary to provide effective information navigation tools that operate over unstructured textual data. Current state-of-the-art methods are limited in terms of providing effective exploration capabilities for various information seeking tasks, especially those arising in domains such as online journalism. Here we argue for improvements in faceted search systems, via new strategies for identifying keyword-based facets. Our proposed technique utilises a PageRank model operating over the graph of terms appearing in documents, while also employing novel methods for biasing significant terms and named entities. In addition, we consider the notion of diversity within extracted keywords in an effort to maximize coverage over a range of topics. We perform experimental evaluations over issues relevant to the Irish General Elections 2016, demonstrating the superior performance of our proposed technique

Exploratory Analysis of Highly Heterogeneous Document Collections

We present an effective multifaceted system for exploratory analysis of highly heterogeneous document collections. Our system is based on intelligently tagging individual documents in a purely automated fashion and exploiting these tags in a powerful faceted browsing framework. Tagging strategies employed include both unsupervised and supervised approaches based on machine learning and natural language processing. As one of our key tagging strategies, we introduce the KERA algorithm (Keyword Extraction for Reports and Articles). KERA extracts topic-representative terms from individual documents in a purely unsupervised fashion and is revealed to be significantly more effective than state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we evaluate our system in its ability to help users locate documents pertaining to military critical technologies buried deep in a large heterogeneous sea of information.Comment: 9 pages; KDD 2013: 19th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Minin

Multi Visualization and Dynamic Query for Effective Exploration of Semantic Data

Semantic formalisms represent content in a uniform way according to ontologies. This enables manipulation and reasoning via automated means (e.g. Semantic Web services), but limits the user’s ability to explore the semantic data from a point of view that originates from knowledge representation motivations. We show how, for user consumption, a visualization of semantic data according to some easily graspable dimensions (e.g. space and time) provides effective sense-making of data. In this paper, we look holistically at the interaction between users and semantic data, and propose multiple visualization strategies and dynamic filters to support the exploration of semantic-rich data. We discuss a user evaluation and how interaction challenges could be overcome to create an effective user-centred framework for the visualization and manipulation of semantic data. The approach has been implemented and evaluated on a real company archive

ENHANCING IMAGE FINDABILITY THROUGH A DUAL-PERSPECTIVE NAVIGATION FRAMEWORK

This dissertation focuses on investigating whether users will locate desired images more efficiently and effectively when they are provided with information descriptors from both experts and the general public. This study develops a way to support image finding through a human-computer interface by providing subject headings and social tags about the image collection and preserving the information scent (Pirolli, 2007) during the image search experience. In order to improve search performance most proposed solutions integrating experts’ annotations and social tags focus on how to utilize controlled vocabularies to structure folksonomies which are taxonomies created by multiple users (Peters, 2009). However, these solutions merely map terms from one domain into the other without considering the inherent differences between the two. In addition, many websites reflect the benefits of using both descriptors by applying a multiple interface approach (McGrenere, Baecker, & Booth, 2002), but this type of navigational support only allows users to access one information source at a time. By contrast, this study is to develop an approach to integrate these two features to facilitate finding resources without changing their nature or forcing users to choose one means or the other. Driven by the concept of information scent, the main contribution of this dissertation is to conduct an experiment to explore whether the images can be found more efficiently and effectively when multiple access routes with two information descriptors are provided to users in the dual-perspective navigation framework. This framework has proven to be more effective and efficient than the subject heading-only and tag-only interfaces for exploratory tasks in this study. This finding can assist interface designers who struggle with determining what information is best to help users and facilitate the searching tasks. Although this study explicitly focuses on image search, the result may be applicable to wide variety of other domains. The lack of textual content in image systems makes them particularly hard to locate using traditional search methods. While the role of professionals in describing items in a collection of images, the role of the crowd in assigning social tags augments this professional effort in a cost effective manner

Collaborative personalised dynamic faceted search

Information retrieval systems are facing challenges due to the overwhelming volume of available information online. It leads to the need of search features that have the capability to provide relevant information for searchers. Dynamic faceted search has been one of the potential tools to provide a list of multiple facets for searchers to filter their contents. However, being a dynamic system, some irrelevant or unimportant facets could be produced. To develop an effective dynamic faceted search, personalised facet selection is an important mechanism to create an appropriate personalised facet list. Most current systems have derived the searchers' interests from their own profiles. However, interests from the past may not be adequate to predict current interest due to human information-seeking behaviour. Incorporating current interests from other people's opinions to predict the interests of individual person is an alternative way to develop personalisation which is called Collaborative approach. This research aims to investigate the incorporation of a Collaborative approach to personalise facet selection. This study introduces the Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based collaborative personalisation architecture framework and Relation-aware Collaborative AutoEncoder model (RCAE) with embedding methodology for modelling and predicting the interests in multiple facets. The study showed that incorporating collaborative approach into the proposed framework for facet selection is capable to enhance the performance of personalisation model in facet selection in comparison to the state-of-the-art techniques

Bibliography versus Auto-Bibliography: Tackling the Transformation of Traditions in the Research Process

Ms. Babb reports on a study conducted to determine whether researchers will identify the same works recommended by scholarly bibliographies if their searching is limited to the confines of the library catalog and its subject headings. She explores how the auto-bibliography of the catalog compares to more traditionally compiled bibliographies, and what—if anything—is sacrificed when users rely upon auto-bibliography rather than scholarly bibliography

HELIN Single Search Task Force Final Report

Final Report of the Single Search Box Task Force of the HELIN Consortium - January 201

How to Debug Inclusivity Bugs? An Empirical Investigation of Finding-to-Fixing with Information Architecture

Background: Although some previous research has found ways to find inclusivity bugs (biases in software that introduce inequities among cognitively diverse individuals), little attention has been paid to how to go about fixing such bugs. We hypothesized that Information Architecture (IA)--the way information is organized, structured and labeled--may provide the missing link from finding inclusivity bugs in information-intensive technology to fixing them. Aims: To investigate whether Information Architecture provides an effective way to remove inclusivity bugs from technology, we created Why/Where/Fix, an inclusivity debugging paradigm that adds inclusivity fault localization via IA. Method: We conducted a qualitative empirical investigation in three stages. (Stage 1): An Open Source (OSS) team used the Why (which cognitive styles) and Where (which IA) parts to guide their understanding of inclusivity bugs in their OSS project’s infrastructure. (Stage 2): The OSS team used the outcomes of Stage One to produce IA-based fixes (Fix) to the inclusivity bugs they had found. (Stage 3): We brought OSS newcomers into the lab to see whether and how the IA-based fixes had improved equity and inclusion across cognitively diverse OSS newcomers. Results: Information Architecture was a source of numerous inclusivity bugs. The OSS team's use of IA to fix these bugs reduced the number of inclusivity bugs participants experienced by 90%. Conclusions: These results provide encouraging evidence that using IA through Why/Where/Fix can help technologists to address inclusivity bugs in information-intensive technologies such as OSS project infrastructures