A study of search intermediary working notes: implications for IR system design

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study investigating working notes created during encoding and external storage (EES) processes, by human search intermediates using a Boolean information retrieval (JR) system. EES processes have been an important area of research in educational contexts where students create and use notes to facilitate learning. In the context of interactive IR, encoding can be conceptualized as the process of creating working notes to help in the understanding and translating a user's information problem into a search strategy suitable for use with an IR system. External storage is the process of using working notes to facilitate interaction with IR systems. Analysis of 221 sets of working notes created by human search intermediaries revealed extensive use of EES processes and the creation of working notes of textual, numerical and graphical entities. Nearly 70% of recorded working notes were textual/numerical entities, nearly 30% were graphical entities and 0.73% were indiscernible. Segmentation devices were also used in 48% of the working notes. The creation of working notes during EES processes was a fundamental element within the mediated, interactive IR process. Implications for the design of IR interfaces to support users' EES processes and further research is discussed

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

The use of implicit evidence for relevance feedback in web retrieval

In this paper we report on the application of two contrasting types of relevance feedback for web retrieval. We compare two systems; one using explicit relevance feedback (where searchers explicitly have to mark documents relevant) and one using implicit relevance feedback (where the system endeavours to estimate relevance by mining the searcher's interaction). The feedback is used to update the display according to the user's interaction. Our research focuses on the degree to which implicit evidence of document relevance can be substituted for explicit evidence. We examine the two variations in terms of both user opinion and search effectiveness

Query Expansion of Zero-Hit Subject Searches: Using a Thesaurus in Conjunction with NLP Techniques

The focus of our study is zero-hit queries in keyword subject searches and the effort of increasing recall in these cases by reformulating and, then, expanding the initial queries using an external source of knowledge, namely a thesaurus. To this end, the objectives of this study are twofold. First, we perform the mapping of query terms to the thesaurus terms. Second, we use the matched terms to expand the user’s initial query by taking advantage of the thesaurus relations and implementing natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We report on the overall procedure and elaborate on key points and considerations of each step of the process

A study on the use of summaries and summary-based query expansion for a question-answering task

In this paper we report an initial study on the effectiveness of query-biased summaries for a question answering task. Our summarisation system presents searchers with short summaries of documents. The summaries are composed of a set of sentences that highlight the main points of the document as they relate to the query. These summaries are also used as evidence for a query expansion algorithm to test the use of summaries as evidence for interactive and automatic query expansion. We present the results of a set of experiments to test these two approaches and discuss the relative success of these techniques

A study of interface support mechanisms for interactive information retrieval

Advances in search technology have meant that search systems can now offer assistance to users beyond simply retrieving a set of documents. For example, search systems are now capable of inferring user interests by observing their interaction, offering suggestions about what terms could be used in a query, or reorganizing search results to make exploration of retrieved material more effective. When providing new search functionality, system designers must decide how the new functionality should be offered to users. One major choice is between (a) offering automatic features that require little human input, but give little human control; or (b) interactive features which allow human control over how the feature is used, but often give little guidance over how the feature should be best used. This article presents a study in which we empirically investigate the issue of control by presenting an experiment in which participants were asked to interact with three experimental systems that vary the degree of control they had in creating queries, indicating which results are relevant in making search decisions. We use our findings to discuss why and how the control users want over search decisions can vary depending on the nature of the decisions and the impact of those decisions on the user's search

A Novel Combined Term Suggestion Service for Domain-Specific Digital Libraries

Interactive query expansion can assist users during their query formulation process. We conducted a user study with over 4,000 unique visitors and four different design approaches for a search term suggestion service. As a basis for our evaluation we have implemented services which use three different vocabularies: (1) user search terms, (2) terms from a terminology service and (3) thesaurus terms. Additionally, we have created a new combined service which utilizes thesaurus term and terms from a domain-specific search term re-commender. Our results show that the thesaurus-based method clearly is used more often compared to the other single-method implementations. We interpret this as a strong indicator that term suggestion mechanisms should be domain-specific to be close to the user terminology. Our novel combined approach which interconnects a thesaurus service with additional statistical relations out-performed all other implementations. All our observations show that domain-specific vocabulary can support the user in finding alternative concepts and formulating queries.Comment: To be published in Proceedings of Theories and Practice in Digital Libraries (TPDL), 201

Query Morphing: A Proximity-Based Approach for Data Exploration

We are living in age where large information in the form of structured and unstructured data is generated through social media, blogs, lab simulations, sensors etc. on daily basis. Due to this occurrences, acquisition of relevant information becomes a challenging task for humans. Fundamental understanding of complex schema and content is necessary for formulating data retrieval request. Therefore, instead of search, we need exploration in which a naïve user walks through the database and stops when satisfactory information is met. During this, a user iteratively transforms his search request in order to gain relevant information; morphing is an approach for generation of various transformation of input. We proposed ‘Query morphing’, an approach for query reformulation based on data exploration. Identified design concerns and implementation constraints are also discussed for the proposed approach