1,834 research outputs found
Learning to Attend, Copy, and Generate for Session-Based Query Suggestion
Users try to articulate their complex information needs during search
sessions by reformulating their queries. To make this process more effective,
search engines provide related queries to help users in specifying the
information need in their search process. In this paper, we propose a
customized sequence-to-sequence model for session-based query suggestion. In
our model, we employ a query-aware attention mechanism to capture the structure
of the session context. is enables us to control the scope of the session from
which we infer the suggested next query, which helps not only handle the noisy
data but also automatically detect session boundaries. Furthermore, we observe
that, based on the user query reformulation behavior, within a single session a
large portion of query terms is retained from the previously submitted queries
and consists of mostly infrequent or unseen terms that are usually not included
in the vocabulary. We therefore empower the decoder of our model to access the
source words from the session context during decoding by incorporating a copy
mechanism. Moreover, we propose evaluation metrics to assess the quality of the
generative models for query suggestion. We conduct an extensive set of
experiments and analysis. e results suggest that our model outperforms the
baselines both in terms of the generating queries and scoring candidate queries
for the task of query suggestion.Comment: Accepted to be published at The 26th ACM International Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2017
Understanding Children’s Help-Seeking Behaviors: Effects of Domain Knowledge
This dissertation explores children’s help-seeking behaviors and use of help features when they formulate search queries and evaluate search results in IR systems. This study was conducted with 30 children who were 8 to 10 years old. The study was designed to answer three research questions with two parts in each: 1(a) What are the types of help-seeking situations experienced by children (8-10 years old) when they formulate search queries in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 1(b) What are the types of help-seeking situations experienced by children (8-10 years old) when they evaluate search results in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 2(a) What types of help features do children (8-10 years old) use and desire when they formulate search queries in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 2(b) What types of help features do children (8-10 years old) use and desire when they evaluate search results in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 3(a) How does children’s (8-10 years old) domain knowledge affect their help seeking and use of help features when they formulate search queries in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 3(b) How does children’s (8-10 years old) domain knowledge affect their help seeking and use of help features when they evaluate search results in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?
This study used multiple data collection methods including performance-based domain knowledge quizzes as direct measurement, domain knowledge self-assessments as indirect measurement, pre-questionnaires, transaction logs, think-aloud protocols, observations, and post-interviews.
Open coding analysis was used to examine children’s help-seeking situations. Children’s cognitive, physical, and emotional types of help-seeking situations when using Google and Kids.gov were identified. To explore help features children use and desire when they formulate search queries and evaluate results in Google and Kids.gov, open coding analysis was conducted. Additional descriptive statistics summarized the frequency of help features children used when they formulated search queries and evaluated results in Google and Kids.gov. Finally, this study investigated the effect of children’s domain knowledge on their help seeking and use of help features in using Google and Kids.gov based on linear regression. The level of children’s self-assessed domain knowledge affects occurrences of their help-seeking situations when they formulated search queries in Google. Similarly, children’s domain knowledge quiz scores showed a statistically significant effect on occurrences of their help-seeking situations when they formulated keywords in Google. In the stage of result evaluations, the level of children’s self-assessed domain knowledge influenced their use of help features in Kids.gov. Furthermore, scores of children’s domain knowledge quiz affected their use of help features when they evaluated search results in Kids.gov. Theoretical and practical implications for reducing children’s cognitive, physical, and emotional help-seeking situations when they formulate search queries and evaluate search results in IR systems were discussed based on the results
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