A competitive environment for exploratory query expansion

Most information workers query digital libraries many times a day. Yet people have little opportunity to hone their skills in a controlled environment, or compare their performance with others in an objective way. Conversely, although search engine logs record how users evolve queries, they lack crucial information about the user's intent. This paper describes an environment for exploratory query expansion that pits users against each other and lets them compete, and practice, in their own time and on their own workstation. The system captures query evolution behavior on predetermined information-seeking tasks. It is publicly available, and the code is open source so that others can set up their own competitive environments

Impact of Women’s Query Formulation on Searching Satisfaction: Implications for Online Marketing in Hospitality and Tourism

The internet’s lack of organization and overwhelming size prohibits consumers from accessing useful and relevant information. The purpose of this study is to discern whether certain query types yield more satisfying search results for women during the vacation planning process. This research also addresses the discrepancies found between the internet’s ontology of hospitality and tourism offerings and women’s conceptualization of corresponding topics by analyzing search satisfaction. The implications for hospitality and tourism are to have a clearer and more accurate online ontology in order to achieve better target marketing. Women are the focus of this study because they are documented to have decision making authority in areas of restaurant selection, lodging accommodations, shopping excursions and other at destination decisions

A framework for test topic generation

This study proposes a test topic generation framework through an analysis of existing literature. The framework contains three components, including a list of questions for eliciting users’ information needs, a mechanism for topic generators to interact with the document collection, and a list of criteria to assess the quality of generated test topics. An application of this framework for generating test topics for a collection of library metadata records is presented

Physicists' Information Tasks: Structure, Length and Retrieval Performance

In this poster, we describe central aspects of 65 natural information tasks from 23 senior researchers, PhDs, and experienced MSc students from three different university departments of physics. We analyze 1) the main purpose of the information task, 2) which and how many search facets were used to describe the tasks, 3) what semantic categories were used to express the search facets, and 4) retrieval performance. Results show variety in structure and length across task descriptions and task purposes. The results indicate effect of length and, in particular, of task purpose on retrieval performance of different document description levels that should be examined further

Les stratégies des jeunes chercheurs d’informations en ligne

Les études sur l’activité de recherche d’information sont généralement menées à partir de la distinction entre experts et novices. Elles montrent que les jeunes utilisent de préférence la navigation à la formulation de requêtes. L’étude analyse les stratégies mises en œuvre et commentées par 15 binômes de collégiens et lycéens. Les résultats indiquent au contraire que la formulation de requête est la stratégie la plus utilisée. Lorsqu’ils explorent le Web à l’aide de moteurs de recherche, les jeunes peuvent inventer des opérateurs et prendre appui sur les termes des pages de résultats pour compenser leurs difficultés dans l’élaboration des requêtes. Ils appliquent plusieurs critères de pertinence dans l’évaluation des documents secondaires. L’activité et les explicitations de leur activité signalent une recherche d’information active. L’analyse des interactions des jeunes avec les moteurs de recherche peut fournir une base pour appréhender la nature située de leur activité de recherche d’information.Researchers have generally investigated information seeking behavior from differences between experts and novices. They have found that young people prefer navigation to query formulation. The present study analysed the behaviour and comments about this behaviour of 15 pairs of middle and high-school students. The results give evidence that query formulation is the most often used strategy. In their Web search engines uses, young people invent operators and take support on search results pages to compensate their difficulties in query elaboration. They apply relevance criteria when they assess secondary documents. Both behavior and comments show an active information searching. The analysis of the interactions with search engines can provide a basis to apprehend the situated nature of their information seeking behavior

Bibliographie

Précisions des auteurs : un nombre relativement important de nos références bibliographiques est désormais disponible dans les archives ouvertes, les pages de chercheurs dans les sites de leurs universités ou leurs sites personnels. Cependant, nous ne transcrivons pas l’adresse (URL) de ces publications en libre accès pour éviter d’allonger une bibliographie déjà bien fournie et nous invitons les lecteurs à les retrouver avec leur moteur de recherche favori, de préférence spécialisé dans les ..

Information flow and product quality in human based assembly

Information is an important part of the manual assembly process. Information provides the user with the means to fulfil assembly tasks so that the right quality as well as high productivity are accomplished. This thesis addresses issues connected to information and information use in a modern manual assembly environment, and how these issues affect human operators, quality and productivity. The overall objectives of the research were to gain further knowledge on how attention affects the internal reject rate, to investigate these phenomena in industrial and laboratory environments and finally to propose a suitable evaluation method to be utilised at the design stage of an information system. Studies were performed with the purpose of investigating how the assembly personnel were affected by the information and how it affected quality and productivity. The studies were performed in an assembly plant and in the laboratory. Quantitative data collection included 10 days and nights of production where the information impact on quality was investigated. Connected to this study was a qualitative survey performed among 171 persons from the assembly personnel. The laboratory study took place during three days, approximately eight hours each day. It involved 30 persons, all experienced assembly workers from the reference assembly plant. The focus of this study was how information affected the personnel and thereby the productivity. The findings revealed that information affected the quality rates and productivity and that this can be linked to how the information is presented as well as when the information is presented. It was possible to link these findings to the outcome of a successful information search process, and to conclude that a use of an evaluation method or work process during the product lifecycle could have made it possible to avoid some of the problems connected to the information presentation. This is the basis for a proposed pragmatic evaluation method. The method was tested as a support system during the design of a prototype user interface to be used at the pilot plant. The major contribution of this research is the connection between attention and quality as well as the connection between attention and productivity. Knowledge regarding the importance of presenting the information at the right time must also be regarded as an important and proven contribution.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo