Searching as learning: Novel measures for information interaction research

There is growing recognition of the importance of learning as a search outcome and of the need to provide support for it. Yet, before we can consider learning as a part of search, we need to know how to assess it. This panel will focus on methods and measures for assessing learning in the context of search tasks and their outcomes. The panel will be interactive as the audience will be encouraged to engage in contributing their own experiences and ideas related to measures and methods to study learning as a part of search processes. Ideas and experiences with explicit and implicit indicators of learning and with evaluating learning outcomes will be shared during a dialogue between the audience and panelists. Outcomes from the panel discussions will contribute to formulating a research agenda for “search as learning.” The outcomes will be shared with the audience (and the wider ASIST community).Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111136/1/meet14505101021.pd

X-site: A workplace search tool for software engineers

ABSTRACT Professionals in the workplace need high-precision search tools capable of retrieving information that is useful and appropriate to the task at hand. One approach to identifying content, which is not only relevant but also useful, is to make use of the task context of the search. We present X-Site, an enterprise search engine for the software engineering domain that exploits relationships between user's tasks and document genres in the collection to improve retrieval precision. Categories and Subject Descriptors SYSTEM OVERVIEW The X-Site concept is based on a domain analysis of the information practices among a community of software engineers in a major technology firm, which identified a strong relationship between the tasks they perform and the document genres they use. This analysis enabled us to identify task-dependent patterns of genre preference, which we incorporated into the ranking algorithm of X-Site. X-Site includes the following components: a task profile, composed of a work task (e.g. installation) and an information task (e.g. find facts), which are elicited from the searcher at query time; a task-genre association matrix, which specifies known positive, neutral and negative relationships between task and genre pairs; a genre weighting component in Okapi BM25. Document genre is a weighted field that is used in combination with term frequency to score structured documents. Each weight represents the strength of each task-genre pair[2]; a genre classifier, which uses supervised machine learning (SVM light 1 ) and textual features to tag the document collection using a domain-specific genre taxonomy; a language identifier, which uses n-gram-based text categorization (libTextCat 2 ); and a multi-user search engine (wumpus 3 ). 1 http://svmlight.joachims.org 2 http://software.wise-guys.nl/libtextcat 3 http://wumpus-search.org X-Site is currently deployed as a prototype in a real workplace environment. It provides a single point of access to ~8GB of content crawled from the Internet, intranet and Lotus Notes data, using a set of seed URLs tailored to the needs of this group. To search using X-Site, the searcher types in a query, and selects a work task and an information task from drop down lists ( Figure 1: X-Site results display with query input sidebar X-Site provides a customized, flexible and user-controlled means of refining results to suit the task context of a search. This is of particular benefit in enterprise information environments, which need to serve diverse user populations and support a wide range of work and information tasks. Future improvements of the XSite system will include a component to monitor implicit measures of document preference during system use in order to tune the task-genre associations. This research was supported by the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto, Canada

Overview of the CHIIR 2019 Workshop on Barriers to InteractiveIR Resources Re-use (BIIRRR 2019)

This paper presents an overview of the BIIRRR 2019 workshop at CHIIR 2019, which had the explicit aim of understanding and promoting re-use of resources for interactive IR experimentation

Modeling the Information Behaviour of Software Engineers Using a Work-Task Framework

Faced with the rapid proliferation of digital information resources within organizations, employees need targeted search systems in order to be effective in their jobs. The goal of this study is to develop a model of information behaviour within a work-task framework that can be used to inform the design of a workplace information search system. In a two-phase process, we conducted a series of studies using multiple methods to identify workplace characteristics and to understand how they influence the needs, search strategies, and information sources used by software engineers working as services consultants in a large high-tech company

Exploiting Task-document Relations in Support of Information Retrieval in the Workplace

Increasingly, workplace information seeking takes place in digital information environments and is reliant upon search systems. Existing systems are designed to retrieve information that is relevant to the query, but are not capable of identifying information that is well-suited to the context and situation of a search. This is a problem for professionals who often are searching for a small amount of useful information that can be applied to a problem or task, and have limited time to browse through large sets of results. This inability of search systems to discriminate between relevant and useful documents is one of the core problems in information retrieval. In this dissertation, I address this problem by studying the role that contextual factors play in determining how a group of professionals searches for and selects information. The central question concerns the nature of the relationships between these contextual factors, specifically between the genres in the document collection and the tasks of the searcher, with an aim to exploit such relationships to improve workplace information retrieval. Research was conducted through multiple studies in three phases, moving from an exploratory study of workplace information behaviour to a controlled experimental user study. Findings confirm that workplace context shapes search behaviour. This relationship is modeled as a set of key contextual factors and sets of context-dependent access constraints, preferred document characteristics, and search strategies. Among the contextual factors identified, work tasks and information tasks were found to be significantly associated with document genres. This task-genre relationship was modeled as a matrix of associations between domain-specific task and genre taxonomies and successfully implemented as a filtering component in a workplace search system. This is the first major study of the relationship between task and genre in information seeking and of its application to information retrieval systems.Ph

A Case Study of New England Open Data Portals

Open government data has proliferated across every level of government in the 2010s, but research has focused primarily on national or municipal portals, which may obscure the challenges faced in providing open government data in less densely populated areas. This research focuses on the cases of three US states- Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. We examine the stated goals of each portal and any policies related to their establishment or upkeep. We then examine the portals with regard to updating, reuse, organization and other factors. Of the three cases, Vermont’s portal is moderately successful and continues to be used. New Hampshire’s strategy of linking to data on agency websites is inconsistent, but the state law requiring data published to be in open formats does mean data is more open when it is provided. Maine’s portal went dormant soon after its initial creation, and was fully taken down in the timeframe of this research. These cases illustrate that the establishment of a state portal alone does not guarantee that the portal will support the desired outcomes