310 research outputs found
Effects of search intent on eye-movement patterns in a change detection task
The goal of the present study was to examine whether intention type affects eye movement patterns in a change detection task In addition, we assessed whether the eye movement index could be used to identify human implicit intent. We attempted to generate three types of intent amongst the study participants, dividing them into one of three conditions; each condition received different information regarding an impending change to the visual stimuli. In the ânavigational intentâ condition, participants were asked to look for any interesting objects, and were not given any more information about the impending change. In the âlow-specific intentâ condition, participants were informed that a change would occur. In the âhigh-specific intentâ condition, participants were told that a change would occur, and that an object would disappear. In addition to this main change detection task, participants also had to perform a primary task, in which they were required to name aloud the colors of objects in the pre-change scene. This allowed us to control for the visual searching process during the pre-change scene. The main results were as follows: firstly, the primary task successfully controlled for the visual search process during the pre-change scene, establishing that there were no differences in the patterns of eye movements across all three conditions despite differing intents. Secondly, we observed significantly different patterns of eye movement between the conditions in the post-change scene, suggesting that generating a specific intent for change detection yields a distinctive pattern of eye-movements. Finally, discriminant function analysis showed a reasonable classification rate for identifying a specific intent. Taken together, it was found that both participant intent and the specificity of information provided to the participants affect eye movements in a change detection task
The Influence of Commercial Intent of Search Results on Their Perceived Relevance
We carried out a retrieval effectiveness test on the three major web search engines (i.e., Google, Microsoft and Yahoo). In addition to relevance judgments, we classified the results according to their commercial intent and whether or not they carried any advertising. We found that all search engines provide a large number of results with a commercial intent. Google provides significantly more commercial results than the other search engines do. However, the commercial intent of a result did not influence jurors in their relevance judgments
Search engine user behaviour: How can users be guided to quality content?
The typical behaviour of the Web search engine user is widely known: a user only types in one or a few keywords
and expects the search engine to produce relevant results in an instant. Search engines not only adapt to this behaviour. On the
contrary, they are often faced with criticism that they themselves created this kind of behaviour. As search engines are trendsetters
for the whole information world, it is important to know how they cope with their usersâ behaviour. Recent developments
show that search engines try to integrate results from different collections into their results lists and to guide their users to the
right results. These results should not only be relevant in general, but also be pertinent in the sense of being relevant to the user
in his current situation and in accordance to his background.
The article focuses on the problems of guiding the user from his initial query to these results. It shows how the general users
are searching and how the intents behind their queries can be used to deliver the right results. It will be shown that search
engines try to give some good results for everyone instead of focusing on complete result sets for a specific user type. If the
user wishes, he can follow the paths laid out by the engines to narrow the results to a result set suitable to him
Variance Reduction in Gradient Exploration for Online Learning to Rank
Online Learning to Rank (OL2R) algorithms learn from implicit user feedback
on the fly. The key of such algorithms is an unbiased estimation of gradients,
which is often (trivially) achieved by uniformly sampling from the entire
parameter space. This unfortunately introduces high-variance in gradient
estimation, and leads to a worse regret of model estimation, especially when
the dimension of parameter space is large.
In this paper, we aim at reducing the variance of gradient estimation in OL2R
algorithms. We project the selected updating direction into a space spanned by
the feature vectors from examined documents under the current query (termed the
"document space" for short), after interleaved test. Our key insight is that
the result of interleaved test solely is governed by a user's relevance
evaluation over the examined documents. Hence, the true gradient introduced by
this test result should lie in the constructed document space, and components
orthogonal to the document space in the proposed gradient can be safely removed
for variance reduction. We prove that the projected gradient is an unbiased
estimation of the true gradient, and show that this lower-variance gradient
estimation results in significant regret reduction. Our proposed method is
compatible with all existing OL2R algorithms which rank documents using a
linear model. Extensive experimental comparisons with several state-of-the-art
OL2R algorithms have confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method in
reducing the variance of gradient estimation and improving overall performance.Comment: Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '19); Key Words:
Online learning to rank, Dueling bandit, Variance Reductio
5 â 4 â 4 â 3: On the Uneven Gaps between Different Levels of Graded User Satisfaction in Interactive Information Retrieval Evaluation
Similar to other ground truth measures, graded user satisfaction has been frequently employed as a continuous variable in information retrieval evaluation based on the assumption that intervals between adjacent grades are quantitatively equal. To examine the validity of equal-gap assumption and explore dynamic perceptual thresholds triggering grade changes in search evaluation, we investigate the extent to which users are sensitive to changes in search efforts and outcomes across different gaps of graded satisfaction. Experiments on four user study datasets (15,337 queries) indicate that 1) User satisfaction sensitivity, especially to offline evaluation metrics, changes significantly across gaps in satisfaction scale; 2) the size and direction of changes in sensitivity vary across study settings, search types, and intentions, especially within â3-5â scale subrange. This study speaks to the fundamentals of user-centered evaluation and advances the knowledge of heterogeneity in satisfaction sensitivity to search efforts and gains and implicit changes in evaluation thresholds
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