Counselor Confirmation Bias: Can the Internet Serve as a Debiasing Tool?

Among laymen and professionals the growing use of the Internet for easy access to information to make decisions has made it important to examine how this easy access could impact the decision making processes. More specifically this research study examined the impact of easy access to the information through the Internet on counselors’ tendency to preferentially note confirmatory information when testing a client hypothesis.In this study 31 participants from master’s and doctoral level counseling programs were asked to select pieces of information from a client narrative that they felt were important in testing a particular client hypothesis. Since participants in several previous studies showed a confirmation bias when presented with this task, in this study participants were asked to search the Internet before selecting information. The study posited two rival hypotheses: H1a, counselors will not show a bias toward selecting confirmatory information if they search the Internet before selecting information from a client narrative to evaluate a client hypothesis. The other hypothesis posited, H1b, counselors will continue to show a bias toward selecting confirmatory information if they search the Internet before selecting information from a client narrative to evaluate a client hypothesis. The results of this study showed that H1a hypothesis was not supported and H1b hypothesis was supported. Easy access to information through the Internet did not reduce confirmation bias among counselors. A secondary analysis also showed that participants’ level of clinical contact hours did not have any significant impact on participants’ confirmation bias. Implications of this research for practice, education and research are discussed

A Study on Structural and Semantic Analysis for Presentation Content Management

兵庫県立大学大学院201

Enhanced web-based summary generation for search.

After a user types in a search query on a major search engine, they are presented with a number of search results. Each search result is made up of a title, brief text summary and a URL. It is then the user\u27s job to select documents for further review. Our research aims to improve the accuracy of users selecting relevant documents by improving the way these web pages are summarized. Improvements in accuracy will lead to time improvements and user experience improvements. We propose ReClose, a system for generating web document summaries. ReClose generates summary content through combining summarization techniques from query-biased and query-independent summary generation. Query-biased summaries generally provide query terms in context. Query-independent summaries focus on summarizing documents as a whole. Combining these summary techniques led to a 10% improvement in user decision making over Google generated summaries. Color-coded ReClose summaries provide keyword usage depth at a glance and also alert users to topic departures. Color-coding further enhanced ReClose results and led to a 20% improvement in user decision making over Google generated summaries. Many online documents include structure and multimedia of various forms such as tables, lists, forms and images. We propose to include this structure in web page summaries. We found that the expert user was insignificantly slowed in decision making while the majority of average users made decisions more quickly using summaries including structure without any decrease in decision accuracy. We additionally extended ReClose for use in summarizing large numbers of tweets in tracking flu outbreaks in social media. The resulting summaries have variable length and are effective at summarizing flu related trends. Users of the system obtained an accuracy of 0.86 labeling multi-tweet summaries. This showed that the basis of ReClose is effective outside of web documents and that variable length summaries can be more effective than fixed length. Overall the ReClose system provides unique summaries that contain more informative content than current search engines produce, highlight the results in a more meaningful way, and add structure when meaningful. The applications of ReClose extend far beyond search and have been demonstrated in summarizing pools of tweets

Using eye tracking for evaluation of information visualisation in web search interfaces

Search result organization and presentation is an important component of a web search system, and can have a substantial impact on the ability of users to find useful information. Most web search result interfaces include textual information, including for example the document title, URL, and a short query-biased summary of the content. Recent studies have developed various novel visual summaries, aiming to improve the effectiveness of search results. In this thesis, the impact and efficacy of presenting additional visual summaries are investigated through a series of four studies. User interaction with the search results was captured using eye tracking data. In the first study we compare the effectiveness of three publicly available search interfaces for supporting navigational search tasks. The three interfaces varied primarily in the proportion of visual versus textual cues that were used to display a search result. Our analysis shows that users' search completion time varies greatly among interfaces, and an appropriate combination of textual and visual information leads to the shortest search completion time and the least number of wrong answers. Another outcome of this experiment is the identification of factors that should be accounted for in subsequent, more controlled, experiments with visual summaries, including the size of the visual summaries and interface design. An understanding of the features and limitations of the eye tracker, particularly for IR studies, was also obtained. To obtain a richer understanding of a user's information seeking strategies and the impact of presenting additional visual summaries, five interfaces were designed: text-only, thumbnail, image, tag and visual snippet. In the second study, fifty participants carried out searches on five informational topics, using the five different interfaces. Findings show that visual summaries significantly impact on the behaviour of users, but not on their performance when predicting the relevance of answer resources. In the third study, fifty participants carried out five navigational topics using the five different interfaces. The results show that apart from the salient image interface, users perform statistically significantly better in terms of time required and effort required to answer given navigational search topics when additional visual summaries are presented. The fourth study was conducted with both navigational and informational topics, for a more detailed comparison between the best-performing interfaces identified in the previous studies: salient images for informational searches, and thumbnails for navigational searches. The findings confirm our previous results. Overall, the salient image interface can significantly increase user performance with informational topics, while thumbnails can help users to predict relevant answers, in a significantly shorter time, with navigational search topics