2 research outputs found
Hear Me Out: A Study on the Use of the Voice Modality for Crowdsourced Relevance Assessments
The creation of relevance assessments by human assessors (often nowadays
crowdworkers) is a vital step when building IR test collections. Prior works
have investigated assessor quality & behaviour, though into the impact of a
document's presentation modality on assessor efficiency and effectiveness.
Given the rise of voice-based interfaces, we investigate whether it is feasible
for assessors to judge the relevance of text documents via a voice-based
interface. We ran a user study (n = 49) on a crowdsourcing platform where
participants judged the relevance of short and long documents sampled from the
TREC Deep Learning corpus-presented to them either in the text or voice
modality. We found that: (i) participants are equally accurate in their
judgements across both the text and voice modality; (ii) with increased
document length it takes participants significantly longer (for documents of
length > 120 words it takes almost twice as much time) to make relevance
judgements in the voice condition; and (iii) the ability of assessors to ignore
stimuli that are not relevant (i.e., inhibition) impacts the assessment quality
in the voice modality-assessors with higher inhibition are significantly more
accurate than those with lower inhibition. Our results indicate that we can
reliably leverage the voice modality as a means to effectively collect
relevance labels from crowdworkers.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 202
Driven to distraction : examining the influence of distractors on search behaviours, performance and experience
Advertisements, sponsored links, clickbait, in-house recommendations and similar elements pervasively shroud featured content. Such elements vie for people's attention, potentially distracting people from their task at hand. The effects of such "distractors" is likely to increase people's cognitive workload and reduce their performance as they need to work harder to discern the relevant from non-relevant. In this paper, we investigate how people of varying cognitive abilities (measured using Perceptual Speed and Cognitive Failure instruments) are affected by these different types of distractions when completing search tasks. We performed a crowdsourced within-subjects user study, where 102 participants completed four search tasks using our news search engine over four different interface conditions: (i) one with no additional distractors; (ii) one with advertisements; (iii) one with sponsored links; and (iv) one with in-house recommendations. Our results highlight a number of important trends and findings. Participants perceived the interface condition without distractors as significantly better across numerous dimensions. Participants reported higher satisfaction, lower workload, higher topic recall, and found it easier to concentrate. Behaviourally, participants issued queries faster and clicked results earlier when compared to the interfaces with distractors. When using the interfaces with distractors, one in ten participants clicked on a distractor—and despite engaging with a distractor for less than twenty seconds, their task time increased by approximately two minutes. We found that the effects were magnified depending on cognitive abilities—with a greater impact of distractors on participants with lower perceptual speed, and for those with a higher propensity of cognitive failures. Distractors—regardless of their type—have negative consequences on a user’s search experience and performance. As a consequence, interfaces containing visually distracting elements are creating poorer search experiences due to the "distractor tax" being placed on people's limited attention