Supporting cross-device web search with social navigation-based mobile touch interactions

The wide adoption of smartphones eliminates the time and location barriers for people’s daily information access, but also limits users’ information exploration activities due to the small mobile screen size. Thus, cross-device web search, where people initialize information needs on one device but complete them on another device, is frequently observed in modern search engines, especially for exploratory information needs. This paper aims to support the cross-device web search, on top of the commonly used context-sensitive retrieval framework, for exploratory tasks. To better model users’ search context, our method not only utilizes the search history (query history and click-through) but also employs the mobile touch interactions (MTI) on mobile devices. To be more specific, we combine MTI’s ability of locating relevant subdocument content [10] with the idea of social navigation that aggregates MTIs from other users who visit the same page. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we designed a user study to collect cross-device web search logs on three different types of tasks from 24 participants and then compared our approach with two baselines: a traditional full text based relevance feedback approach and a self-MTI based subdocument relevance feedback approach. Our results show that the social navigation-based MTIs outperformed both baselines. A further analysis shows that the performance improvements are related to several factors, including the quality and quantity of click-through documents, task types and users’ search conditions

Exploratory Search on Mobile Devices

The goal of this thesis is to provide a general framework (MobEx) for exploratory search especially on mobile devices. The central part is the design, implementation, and evaluation of several core modules for on-demand unsupervised information extraction well suited for exploratory search on mobile devices and creating the MobEx framework. These core processing elements, combined with a multitouch - able user interface specially designed for two families of mobile devices, i.e. smartphones and tablets, have been finally implemented in a research prototype. The initial information request, in form of a query topic description, is issued online by a user to the system. The system then retrieves web snippets by using standard search engines. These snippets are passed through a chain of NLP components which perform an ondemand or ad-hoc interactive Query Disambiguation, Named Entity Recognition, and Relation Extraction task. By on-demand or ad-hoc we mean the components are capable to perform their operations on an unrestricted open domain within special time constraints. The result of the whole process is a topic graph containing the detected associated topics as nodes and the extracted relation ships as labelled edges between the nodes. The Topic Graph is presented to the user in different ways depending on the size of the device she is using. Various evaluations have been conducted that help us to understand the potentials and limitations of the framework and the prototype

Development Of Mobile Search Applications Over Structured Web Data Through Domain-specific Modeling Languages

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2012Thesis (M.Sc.) -- İstanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, 2012Kişisel bilgisayarlar için geliştirilen metin-tabanlı web arama gezgin cihazlara geçişte geliştirilip iyileştirilebilir. Web aramadaki yeni yöntemler kullanıcının gezgin cihazın kısıtlarına takılmadan arama yapmasını sağlayabilir. Hatta, uygun çözümler bu tür cihazların güçlü yanlarından da yararlanmayı sağlayabilir. Bu tezde arama alanındaki yeni eğilim ve teknolojilerin, özellikle de çok alanlı ve keşifçi aramanın gezgin ortamlara nasıl uygulanabileceğini göstermektedir.Text-based web search that is primarily designed for personal computers, can be enhanced and optimized while moving to mobile devices. New methods on web search may let user conduct the search without being hampered by the limitations of the device. Moreover, appropriate solutions may also exploit the advantages of such devices. This thesis summarizes new trends and technologies of searching, especially multi-domain and exploratory search, as well as demonstrating how they can be best applied to mobile environments.Yüksek LisansM.Sc

Cultural Citizen Inquiry: Making space for the ‘everyday’ in language teaching and learning

This chapter presents a small exploratory study undertaken as action research in two community schools in the UK that draws on a blended approach to language learning and utilises methods of inquiry learning (e.g., observation, data collection, reflection) along with web and mobile technologies to facilitate young people’s engagement in citizen-led inquiry with a focus on social and cultural issues. The chapter introduces the idea of cultural citizen inquiry as a method that may validate young heritage language learners’ search for identity, usually intertwined with heritage and culture, and also support them to engage critically with their everyday experiences

A Nine Month Report on Progress Towards a Framework for Evaluating Advanced Search Interfaces considering Information Retrieval and Human Computer Interaction

This is a nine month progress report detailing my research into supporting users in their search for information, where the questions, results or even thei

Information Technology Applications in Hospitality and Tourism: A Review of Publications from 2005 to 2007

The tourism and hospitality industries have widely adopted information technology (IT) to reduce costs, enhance operational efficiency, and most importantly to improve service quality and customer experience. This article offers a comprehensive review of articles that were published in 57 tourism and hospitality research journals from 2005 to 2007. Grouping the findings into the categories of consumers, technologies, and suppliers, the article sheds light on the evolution of IT applications in the tourism and hospitality industries. The article demonstrates that IT is increasingly becoming critical for the competitive operations of the tourism and hospitality organizations as well as for managing the distribution and marketing of organizations on a global scale

Investigating the Effects of Exploratory Semantic Search on the Use of a Museum Archive

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in how new technologies can support the more effective use of online museum content. Two particularly relevant developments are exploratory search and semantic web technologies. Exploratory search tools support a more undirected and serendipitous interaction with the content. Semantic web technology, when applied in this context, allows the exploitation of metadata and ontologies to provide more intelligent support for user interaction. Bletchley Park Text is a museum web application supporting a semantic driven, exploratory approach to the search and navigation of digital museum resources. Bletchley Park Text uses semantics to organise selected content (i.e. stories) into a number of composite pages that illustrate conceptual patterns in the content, and from which the content itself can be accessed. The use made of Bletchley Park Text over an eight month period was analysed in order to understand the kinds of trajectories across the available resources that users could make with such a system. The results identified two distinct strategies of exploratory search. A risky strategy was characterised as incorporating: conceptual jumps between successive queries, a larger number of shorter queries and the use of the stories themselves to acclimatise to a new set of search results. A cautious strategy was characterised as incorporating: small conceptual shifts between queries, a smaller number of longer queries and the use of composite pages to acclimatise to a set of new search results. These findings have implications for the intelligent scaffolding of exploratory search

Analysis of the Influence of Internet TV Station on Wikipedia Page Views

We aim to investigate the influence of television on the web; if the influence is strong, a viral effect may be expected. In this paper, we focus on the Internet TV station and on Wikipedia use as exploratory behavior on the web. We analyzed the influence of Internet TV station on Wikipedia page views. Our aim is to clarify the characteristics of page views as related to Internet TV station in order to index outward impact and develop a prediction model. The results indicate that there is a correlation between TV viewership and page views. Moreover we find that the time lag between TV and web gradually reduce as broadcasts begin after 9:00; after 23:00, page views tend to be maximized during the broadcast itself. We also differentiate between page views on PC and on mobile and find that PC pages tend to be accessed more during the daytime. In addition, we consider the number of broadcasts per program, and observe that viewership tends to stabilize as the number of broadcasts increases but that page views tend to decrease.Comment: The 3rd International Workshop on Application of Big Data for Computational Social Science (ABCSS2018