Understanding and conceptualising the document triage process through information seekers' visual and navigational attention

Information, is a valuable commodity and its effective use is a vital part of everyday life. With the advancements of the internet and the increasing accessibility to it, the location of information is no longer the primary concern of information seekers. Digitisation techniques have made a wide variety of documents available on-line, and more and more publications are being published in electronic form simultaneously to their physical counterpart. The largest challenge currently facing information seekers is that of locating the correct information from the abundance available to them. Whenever a search query is made, the user is inundated with multiple options of documents to choose from. These documents are all deemed to have some relevance to the query produced by using an information retrieval algorithm. Thus far, automatic support has only been provided until the document retrieval level. The user is then left to search through the result set, mostly unaided, by the system he is using. In order to facilitate support for the users, a solid understanding of the information seeker's behaviours during this triage process is vital. Thus far, research into the behaviour of information seekers during the specific triage behaviour is limited. Even more limited however, is the evidence reporting the visual attention of the users. Since the triage process is highly visual, this important element need to be thoroughly evidence before accurately conceptualising the entire process. For this reason, this thesis aims to investigate the visual attention of information seekers during the document triage process. This will inform the modelling and conceptualisation of information seekers' behaviour during triage. In turn, this can be used to inform the design of supportive software. The thesis contains a review of related research and identifies the gaps that needs further investigation. From these, a series of user studies are then conducted on document triage. These in turn, facilitate the formulation and discussion of 2 document triage models and measurements to record the effectiveness of document triage. We study the visual attention of information seekers in four lab based studies, eliciting their exact gaze and focus details. We expand current research in the information seeking domain by reporting on findings from users' triage activities on small screen devices and when under time constraints. Furthermore, a high level diary study, gives us richer data on participants' triage activities over a larger period of time in their natural surroundings. All the studies are brought together to elicit requirements and measurements to understand system and user efficiency during each stage of the triage process

Visual analysis of document triage data

As part of the information seeking process, a large amount of effort is invested in order to study and understand how information seekers search through documents such that they can assess their relevance. This search and assessment of document relevance, known as document triage, is an important information seeking process, but is not yet well understood. Human-computer interaction (HCI) and digital library scientists have undertaken a series of user studies involving information seeking, collected a large amount of data describing information seekers' behavior during document search. Next to this, we have witnessed a rapid increase in the number of off-the-shelf visualization tools which can benefit document triage study. Here we set out to utilize existing information visualization techniques and tools in order to gain a better understanding of the large amount of user-study data collected by HCI and digital library researchers. We describe the range of available tools and visualizations we use in order to increase our knowledge of document triage. Treemap, parallel coordinates, stack graph, matrix chart, as well as other visualization methods, prove to be insightful in exploring, analyzing and presenting user behavior during document triage. Our findings and visualizations are evaluated by HCI and digital library researchers studying this proble

Understanding and conceptualising the document triage process through information seekers' visual and navigational attention

Information is a valuable commodity and its effective use is a vital part of everyday life. With the advancements of the internet and the increasing accessibility to it, the location of information is no longer the primary concern of information seekers. Digitisation techniques have made a wide variety of documents available on-line, and more and more publications are being published in electronic form simultaneously to their physical counterpart. The largest challenge currently facing information seekers is that of locating the correct information from the abundance available to them. Whenever a search query is made, the user is inundated with multiple options of documents to choose from. These documents are all deemed to have some relevance to the query produced by using an information retrieval algorithm. Thus far, automatic support has only been provided until the document retrieval level. The user is then left to search through the result set, mostly unaided, by the system he is using. In order to facilitate support for the users, a solid understanding of the information seeker's behaviours during this triage process is vital. Thus far, research into the behaviour of information seekers during the specific triage behaviour is limited. Even more limited however, is the evidence reporting the visual attention of the users. Since the triage process is highly visual, this important element needs to be thoroughly evidenced before accurately conceptualising the entire process. For this reason, this thesis aims to investigate the visual attention of information seekers during the document triage process. This will inform the modelling and conceptualisation of information seekers' behaviour during triage. In turn, this can be used to inform the design of supportive software. The thesis contains a review of related research and identifies the gaps that needs further investigation. From these, a series of user studies are then conducted on document triage. These in turn, facilitate the formulation and discussion of 2 document triage models and measurements to record the effectiveness of document triage. We study the visual attention of information seekers in four lab based studies, eliciting their exact gaze and focus details. We expand current research in the information seeking domain by reporting on findings from users' triage activities on small screen devices and when under time constraints. Furthermore, a high level diary study, gives us richer data on participants' triage activities over a larger period of time in their natural surroundings. All the studies are brought together to elicit requirements and measurements to understand system and user efficiency during each stage of the triage process.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Interactive Reading Using Low Cost Brain Computer Interfaces

This work shows the feasibility for document reader user applications using a consumer grade non-invasive BCI headset. Although Brain Computer Interface (BCI) type devices are beginning to aim at the consumer level, the level at which they can actually detect brain activity is limited. There is however progress achieved in allowing for interaction between a human and a computer when this interaction is limited to around 2 actions. We employed the Emotiv Epoc, a low-priced BCI headset, to design and build a proof-of-concept document reader system that allows users to navigate the document using this low cast BCI device. Our prototype has been implemented and evaluated with 12 participants who were trained to navigate documents using signals acquired by Emotive Epoc

A methodology for digitally exploring electronic publication content

The work in this article presents a methodology and coding examples to be used by those wanting to explore the content of a large corpus of digital publications stored online in PDF format and gain insight into their common content and changes over time. The method can produce hypothesis of topic popularity and point to areas for further scrutiny in terms of common emerging themes. This practitioner article provides a very specific and directed resource for information seekers, both technical in nature and not, in exploring potential themes and likely trends within a corpus

Developing computational infrastructure for the CorCenCC corpus - the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh

CorCenCC (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes - National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh) is the first comprehensive corpus of Welsh designed to be reflective of language use across communication types, genres, speakers, language varieties (regional and social) and contexts. This article focuses on the computational infrastructure that we have designed to support data collection for CorCenCC, and the subsequent uses of the corpus which include lexicography, pedagogical research and corpus analysis. A grass-roots approach to design has been adopted, that has adapted and extended previous corpus-building and introduced new features as required for this specific context and language. The key pillars of the infrastructure include a framework that supports metadata collection, an innovative mobile application designed to collect spoken data (utilising a crowdsourcing approach), a backend database that stores curated data and a web-based interface that allows users to query the data online. A usability study was conducted to evaluate the user facing tools and to suggest directions for future improvements. Though the infrastructure was developed for Welsh language collection, its design can be re-used to support corpus development in other minority or major language contexts, broadening the potential utility and impact of this work

TechMaps: exploring technology relationships through patent information based proximity

Our work provides a novel method for rich information discovery about the evolution of technical fields and company developments through patent relationships. A new exploratory method and graphical tool to discover technology proximity based on patent classification information are introduced. By technology we mean a technical field (defined by an International Patent Classification—IPC—code or a combination of them) or an organization (such as a tech company, research center, or institution). A single data structure is used for characterizing both technical fields and organizations, to visualize them as items of the very same body. This new method generates two graphs: the first graph, the TechnologyMap, visualizes technology items in a 2D plot wherein technical fields and companies will appear positioned relative to each other; the. A second graph, the Focused TechnologyMap, visualizes technology items with respect to a selected one, the focus, which is located in the center of a circle whose radii correspond to the complete set of IPC codes. This article represents the process and algorithms used for production of the graphs, and solidifies the assumptions of validity by presenting two of the many successful test cases to which it was applied

Novel data structure and visualization tool for studying technology evolution based on patent information: The DTFootprint and the TechSpectrogram

We introduce a new, bespoke data structure to analyze and visualize the evolution of a technology. The technology under analysis is defined by a set of patents corresponding to a technical field, owned by a company or invented by a team of research. Our data structure, the Dynamic Technology Footprint –DTFootprint–, facilitates the analysis and visualization of trends and dynamics of a given technology, and therefore the evolution of a technical field, a company, or a team of people. A graphical tool based on our data structure is defined, it is named Technology Spectrogram –TechSpectrogram–, because it is inspired by the acoustic frequency spectrograms: as the acoustic frequency spectrograms visualize the dynamics of an acoustic wave showing the evolution of its frequency components our tool shows the dynamics of a technology showing the evolution of its technological components, which are represented by the whole set of IPC-codes. Our graphical tool, the TechSpectrogram is shown for some study cases, and its application to the history of technology and technology management are disclosed

Breaking boundaries with live transcribe: expanding use cases beyond standard captioning scenarios

In this paper, we explore non-traditional, serendipitous uses of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) application called Live Transcribe. Through these, we are able to identify interaction use cases for developing further technology to enhance the communication capabilities of deaf and hard of hearing people