Content or context? Searching for musical meaning in task-based interactive information retrieval

Creative professionals search for digital music to accompany moving images using interactive information retrieval systems run by music publishers and record companies. This research investigates the creative professionals and the intermediaries communication processes and information seeking and use behaviour with a view to making recommendations to information retrieval systems builders as to the extent of relative importance of content and contextual factors. A communications model is used to suggest that the meaning of music is determined by its listener and use context, as well as cultural codes and competences. The research is framed by a holistic approach based on Ingwersen and Jarvelin’s Interactive Information Seeking, Retrieval and Behavioral processes model

TEMU KEMBALI INFORMASI DARI SUDUT PANDANG PENDEKATAN BERORIENTASI PEMAKAI

User oriented approach is a systematic study of users’ characteristics and behaviours to find information concerning its interaction with information systems (instutions). Basically there are three approaches to the study of information retrival processes, namely traditional approach, user oriented, and cognitif approach. The user-oriented approach to information retrieval research provides information retrieval theory with a substantial insight into users’ mental behaviour and information seeking characteristics. This approach focusses itself on the psychological and behavioral aspects of the communication between users and authors. This approach aims at the improvement of information retrieval effectiveness within the framework of the users, their information need, and the interactive processes of searching behaviour. But, this interaction process still could not solve the users’ problems. This is caused by the interation between information retrieval technique using matching system and clossed questions. In order to get more evidence about users problems or information need, further questions or feedback from the user in order to know whether intermediary interpretation match with the user’s or not are needed. The user oriented approach is still connected to information systems so that it is considered to have the same shortcoming as the traditional approach is. This reason caused the cognitive approach to appear

The development of a model of information seeking behaviour of students in higher education when using internet search engines.

This thesis develops a model of Web information seeking behaviour of postgraduate students with a specific focus on Web search engines' use. It extends Marchionini's eight stage model of information seeking, geared towards electronic environments, to holistically encompass the physical, cognitive, affective and social dimensions of Web users' behaviour. The study recognises the uniqueness of the Web environment as a vehicle for information dissemination and retrieval, drawing on the distinction between information searching and information seeking and emphasises the importance of following user-centred holistic approaches to study information seeking behaviour. It reviews the research in the field and demonstrates that there is no comprehensive model that explains the behaviour of Web users when employing search engines for information retrieval. The methods followed to develop the study are explained with a detailed analysis of the four dimensions of information seeking (physical, cognitive affective, social). Emphasis is placed on the significance of combined methods (qualitative and quantitative) and the ways in which they can enrich the examination of human behaviour. This is concluded with a discussion of methodological issues. The study is supported by an empirical investigation, which examines the relationship between interactive information retrieval using Web search engines and human information seeking processes. This investigates the influence of cognitive elements (such as learning and problem style, and creative ability) and affective characteristics (e. g. confidence, loyalty, familiarity, ease of use), as well as the role that system experience, domain knowledge and demographics play in information seeking behaviour and in user overall satisfaction with the retrieval result. The influence of these factors is analysed by identifying users' patterns of behaviour and tactics, adopted to solve specific problems. The findings of the empirical study are incorporated into an enriched information-seeking model, encompassing use of search engines, which reveals a complex interplay between physical, cognitive, affective and social elements and that none of these characteristics can be seen in isolation when attempting to explain the complex phenomenon of information seeking behaviour. Although the model is presented in a linear fashion the dynamic, reiterative and circular character of the information seeking process is explained through an emphasis on transition patterns between the different stages. The research concludes with a discussion of problems encountered by Web information seekers which provides detailed analysis of the reasons why users express satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the results of Web searching, areas in which Web search engines can be improved and issues related to the need for students to be given additional training and support are identified. These include planning and organising information, recognising different dimensions of information intents and needs, emphasising the importance of variety in Web information seeking, promoting effective formulation of queries and ranking, reducing overload of information and assisting effective selection of Web sites and critical examination of results

Metadata visualization of scholarly search results

Studies of online search behaviour have found that searchers often face difficulties formulating queries and exploring the search results sets. These shortcomings may be especially problematic in digital libraries since library searchers employ a wide variety of information-seeking methods (with varying degrees of support), and the corpus to be searched is often more complex than simple textual information. To address these problems, an interactive Web-based library search interface is presented, which has been designed to support strategic retrieval behaviour of library searchers. This system takes advantage of the rich metadata associated with academic documents and employs information visualization techniques to provide searchers with additional information-seeking tools. These tools are designed to facilitate visual and interactive query refinement, search results exploration, and citation navigation. User evaluations illustrate the potential benefits of the design choices in comparison to a list-based digital library search interface

Thesaurus-assisted search term selection and query expansion: a review of user-centred studies

This paper provides a review of the literature related to the application of domain-specific thesauri in the search and retrieval process. Focusing on studies which adopt a user-centred approach, the review presents a survey of the methodologies and results from empirical studies undertaken on the use of thesauri as sources of term selection for query formulation and expansion during the search process. It summaries the ways in which domain-specific thesauri from different disciplines have been used by various types of users and how these tools aid users in the selection of search terms. The review consists of two main sections covering, firstly studies on thesaurus-aided search term selection and secondly those dealing with query expansion using thesauri. Both sections are illustrated with case studies that have adopted a user-centred approach

A framework for investigating the interaction in information retrieval

To increase retrieval effectiveness, information retrieval systems must offer better supports to users in their information seeking activities. To achieve this, one major concern is to obtain a better understanding of the nature of the interaction between a user and an information retrieval system. For this, we need a means to analyse the interaction in information retrieval, so as to compare the interaction processes within and across information retrieval systems. We present a framework for investigating the interaction between users and information retrieval systems. The framework is based on channel theory, a theory of information and its flow, which provides an explicit ontology that can be used to represent any aspect of the interaction process. The developed framework allows for the investigation of the interaction in information retrieval at the desired level of abstraction. We use the framework to investigate the interaction in relevance feedback and standard web search

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

Evaluating advanced search interfaces using established information-seeking model

When users have poorly defined or complex goals search interfaces offering only keyword searching facilities provide inadequate support to help them reach their information-seeking objectives. The emergence of interfaces with more advanced capabilities such as faceted browsing and result clustering can go some way to some way toward addressing such problems. The evaluation of these interfaces, however, is challenging since they generally offer diverse and versatile search environments that introduce overwhelming amounts of independent variables to user studies; choosing the interface object as the only independent variable in a study would reveal very little about why one design out-performs another. Nonetheless if we could effectively compare these interfaces we would have a way to determine which was best for a given scenario and begin to learn why. In this article we present a formative framework for the evaluation of advanced search interfaces through the quantification of the strengths and weaknesses of the interfaces in supporting user tactics and varying user conditions. This framework combines established models of users, user needs, and user behaviours to achieve this. The framework is applied to evaluate three search interfaces and demonstrates the potential value of this approach to interactive IR evaluation

A strategy for evaluating search of “Real” personal information archives

Personal information archives (PIAs) can include materials from many sources, e.g. desktop and laptop computers, mobile phones, etc. Evaluation of personal search over these collections is problematic for reasons relating to the personal and private nature of the data and associated information needs and measuring system response effectiveness. Conventional information retrieval (IR) evaluation involving use of Cranfield type test collections to establish retrieval effectiveness and laboratory testing of interactive search behaviour have to be re-thought in this situation. One key issue is that personal data and information needs are very different to search of more public third party datasets used in most existing evaluations. Related to this, understanding the issues of how users interact with a search system for their personal data is important in developing search in this area on a well grounded basis. In this proposal we suggest an alternative IR evaluation strategy which preserves privacy of user data and enables evaluation of both the accuracy of search and exploration of interactive search behaviour. The general strategy is that instead of a common search dataset being distributed to participants, we suggest distributing standard expandable personal data collection, indexing and search tools to non-intrusively collect data from participants conducting search tasks over their own data collections on their own machines, and then performing local evaluation of individual results before central agregation