Examining Users’ Knowledge Change in the Task Completion Process

This paper examines the changes of information searchers’ topic knowledge levels in the process of completing information tasks. Multi-session tasks were used in the study, which enables the convenience of eliciting users’ topic knowledge during their process of completing the whole tasks. The study was a 3-session laboratory experiment with 24 participants, each time working on one subtask in an assigned 3-session general task. The general task was either parallel or dependently structured. Questionnaires were administered before and after each session to elicit users’ perceptions of their knowledge levels, task attributes, and other task features, for both the overall task and the sub-tasks. Our results support the assumption that users’ knowledge generally increases after each search session, but there were exceptions in which a “ceiling” effect was shown. We also found that knowledge was correlated with users’ perceptions of task attributes and accomplishment. In addition, task type was found to affect several aspects of knowledge levels and knowledge change. These findings further our understanding of users’ knowledge in information tasks and are thus helpful for information retrieval research and system design

SEARCHING AS THINKING: THE ROLE OF CUES IN QUERY REFORMULATION

Given the growing volume of information that surrounds us, search, and particularly web search, is now a fundamental part of how people perceive and experience the world. Understanding how searchers interact with search engines is thus an important topic both for designers of information retrieval systems and educators working in the area of digital literacy. Reaching such understanding, however, with the more established, system-centric, approaches in information retrieval (IR) is limited. While inherently iterative nature of the search process is generally acknowledged in the field of IR, research on query reformulation is typically limited to dealing with the what or the how of the query reformulation process. Drawing a complete picture of searchers\u27 behavior is thus incomplete without addressing the why of query reformulation, including what pieces of information, or cues, trigger the reformulation process. Unpacking that aspect of the searchers\u27 behavior requires a more user-centric approach. The overall goal of this study is to advance understanding of the reformulation process and the cues that influence it. It was driven by two broad questions about the use of cues (on the search engine result pages or the full web pages) in the searchers\u27 decisions regarding query reformulation and the effects of that use on search effectiveness. The study draws on data collected in a lab setting from a sample of students who performed a series of search tasks and then went through a process of stimulated recall focused on their query reformulations. Both, query reformulations recorded during the search tasks and cues elicited during the stimulated recall exercise, were coded and then modeled using the mixed effects method. The final models capture the relationships between cues and query reformulation strategies as well as cues and search effectiveness; in both cases some relationships are moderated by search expertise and domain knowledge. The results demonstrate that searchers systematically elicit and use cues with regard to query reformulation. Some of these relationships are independent from search expertise and domain knowledge, while others manifest themselves differently at different levels of search expertise and domain knowledge. Similarly, due to the fact that the majority of the reformulations in this study indicated a failure of the preceding query, mixed results were achieved with identifying relationships between the use of cues and search effectiveness. As a whole, this work offers two contributions to the field of user-centered information retrieval. First, it reaffirms some of the earlier conceptual work about the role of cues in search behavior, and then expands on it by proposing specific relationships between cues and reformulations. Second, it highlights potential design considerations in creating search engine results pages and query term suggestions, as well as and training suggestion for educators working on digital literacy

Seven years of INEX interactive retrieval experiments – lessons and challenges

This paper summarizes a major effort in interactive search investigation, the INEX i-track, a collective effort run over a seven-year period. We present the experimental conditions, report some of the findings of the participating groups, and examine the challenges posed by this kind of collective experimental effort

Understanding “influence”: An exploratory study of academics’ process of knowledge construction through iterative and interactive information seeking

The motivation for this study is to better understand the searching and sensemaking processes undertaken to solve exploratory tasks for which people lack pre-existing frames. To investigate people’s strategies for that type of task, we focused on “influence” tasks because, although they appear to be unfamiliar, they arise in much academic discourse, at least tacitly. This qualitative study reports the process undertaken by academics of different levels of seniority to complete exploratory search tasks that involved identifying influential members of their academic community and “rising stars, ” and to identify similar roles in an unfamiliar academic community. 11 think-aloud sessions followed by semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate the role of specific and general domain expertise in the process of information seeking and knowledge construction. Academics defined and completed the task through an iterative and interactive process of seeking and sensemaking, during which they constructed an understanding of their communities and determined qualities of “being influential”. Elements of the Data/Frame Theory of Sensemaking (Klein et al., 2007) were used as sensitising theoretical constructs. The study shows that both external and internal knowledge resources are essential to define a starting point or frame, make and support decisions, and experience satisfaction. Ill-defined or non-existent initial frames may cause unsubstantial or arbitrary decisions, and feelings of uncertainty and lack of confidence

The Effect of Task Type and Information Format on Web Searching Performance

Web search engines have become a useful tool helping Web users seek required information. Such Web sites typically present searched results as a textual list that may include thousands of Web pages. Because of the unstructured content and format of information that searchers receive, they often feel the pressure of information overload, which will inevitably compromise the quality of decision-making. Although researchers as well as practitioners have developed various information visualization approaches to enhance information presentation on Web search engines, the benefits of using such technology are unknown. This study will investigate whether and under what circumstances visualization of search results enhances users’ search performance. Cognitive fit theory will be used as the theoretical foundation of this paper. The objectives of the paper are 1) to extent cognitive fit theory in the emergent domain of Web searching, 2) to understand the effects of the user interface on search performance, and 3) to guide search engine designers on how to best present results to support different search tasks

A novice-expert comparison in information search

In the age of Google, it is commonly believed that university students, especially those at postgraduate level, should have attained enough information searching skills to support their studies. However, recent researches have found that the information literacy level of quite a few postgraduate students is, in fact, far from satisfactory. One possible way for information search specialists to help students effectively search information is to use a novice-expert comparison to examine the differences between novices and experts in information search. The aim of this study is to uncover some of the major differences in the search query statements and information search strategies between eight doctoral students (novice searchers) and an expert information literacy professional. Preliminary findings show that conspicuous differences do exist in the complexity of the formulation of query statements, choice of keywords, use of operators between the novice and the expert searchers.postprin

QWERTY: The effects of typing on web search behavior

Typing is a common form of query input for search engines and other information retrieval systems; we therefore investigate the relationship between typing behavior and search interactions. The search process is interactive and typically requires entering one or more queries, and assessing both summaries from Search Engine Result Pages and the underlying documents, to ultimately satisfy some information need. Under the Search Economic Theory model of interactive information retrieval, differences in query costs will result in search behavior changes. We investigate how differences in query inputs themselves may relate to Search Economic Theory by conducting a lab-based experiment to observe how text entries influence subsequent search interactions. Our results indicate that for faster typing speeds, more queries are entered in a session, while both query lengths and assessment times are lower