How does AI chat change search behaviors?

Generative AI tools such as chatGPT are poised to change the way people engage with online information. Recently, Microsoft announced their "new Bing" search system which incorporates chat and generative AI technology from OpenAI. Google has announced plans to deploy search interfaces that incorporate similar types of technology. These new technologies will transform how people can search for information. The research presented here is an early investigation into how people make use of a generative AI chat system (referred to simply as chat from here on) as part of a search process, and how the incorporation of chat systems with existing search tools may effect users search behaviors and strategies. We report on an exploratory user study with 10 participants who used a combined Chat+Search system that utilized the OpenAI GPT-3.5 API and the Bing Web Search v5 API. Participants completed three search tasks. In this pre-print paper of preliminary results, we report on ways that users integrated AI chat into their search process, things they liked and disliked about the chat system, their trust in the chat responses, and their mental models of how the chat system generated responses

Voice Navigation of Structured Web Spaces

Voice Navigation of web spaces has become a reality in the last few years, partly due to the rapid adoption of VoiceXML and the increase in communication quality and computing power of cell-phones. This report discusses some of the approaches on how to convert the web content to a way that could be used from a voice-enabled phone. These approaches have different pros and cons when it comes to the usability of the voice-navigation of web spaces. This report discusses our work to produce voice navigation of web spaces placing usability as the highest criteria. We have designed of a voice user interface for pages with a fixed structure and user-specified content, such as My Yahoo! pages. For these types of pages, we have defined the voice navigation strategy that we will use and conducted an initial usability study on this navigation strategy. From the usability study we have obtained validation for some of our approaches, and learned some new concepts in voice navigation as well. With our findings, we are defining annotation tags that can be used to produce highly usable web pages over a phone user interface. In this paper we describe our initial study and the findings of the study

Hci browser: A tool for studying web search behavior

ABSTRACT We introduce the HCI Browser, a Mozilla Firefox extension designed to support studies of Web search behaviors. The HCI Browser presents tasks to the user, collects browser event data as the user searches for information, records answers that are found, and administers pre-and post-task questionnaires. The HCI Browser is a configurable tool that researchers can use to conduct studies and gather data. It is especially well suited for "batch mode" laboratory studies in which multiple participants complete a study at the same time, but work independently. The HCI Browser is open-source software and is available for download at: http://ils.unc.edu/hcibrowser Keywords Data collection tools, Web search behaviors

Refinding is Not Finding Again

A challenging problem for Internet users today is how to refind information that they have seen before. We believe that finding and refinding are different user activities and require different types of support. The problem of how to find information on the web is studied extensively---new search algorithms, support for natural language queries, and innovative document indexing techniques are common topics in information retrieval research; visualizations of documents, and task support for finding are topics in human-computer interaction. But refinding has only recently begun to receive attention. In this article, we present evidence to support the claim that information refinding is a different activity than information finding. We present results that show how refinding is different from finding and suggest ways to improve web information seeking tools and designs tosupport refinding information

The Staging Transformation Approach to Mixing Initiative

Mixed-initiative interaction is an important facet of many conversational interfaces, flexible planning architectures, intelligent tutoring systems, and interactive information retrieval systems. Software systems for mixed-initiative interaction must enable us to both operationalize the mixing of initiative (i.e., support the creation of practical dialogs) and to reason in real-time about how a flexible mode of interaction can be supported (e.g., from a meta-dialog standpoint). In this paper, we present the staging transformation approach to mixing initiative, where a dialog script captures the structure of the dialog and dialog control processes are realized through generous use of program transformation techniques (e.g., partial evaluation, currying, slicing); this allows control to be cast as the process of moving from one dialog script to another. In this approach, operationalizing mixed-initiative interaction becomes the task of finding a suitable program transformation to stage the interaction between the two participants. We highlight the advantages of this approach and present its realization in various modalities for information seeking dialogs. We also outline how high-level reasoning capabilities about dialogs can be provided in the staging transformation framework

Jury’s achter Lely’s meesterwerk

In dit rapport schetsen we allereerst een beeld van het proces, vanaf de voorbereiding van het voorstel om met burgerjury’s te werken tot en met de doorwerking van de adviezen in de besluitvorming over het Omgevingsplan door Provinciale Staten. We geven een korte beschrijving van de feitelijke gang van zaken, met daarbij de beelden die hierover in de interviews zijn verwoord door burgers, politici en projectmedewerkers. Vervolgens bespreken we een aantal belangrijke factoren die het proces hebben beïnvloed, namelijk de taakverdeling tussen GS en PS ten aanzien van de communicatie met de samenleving, de formulering van de vraagstellingen, de status van de burgerjuryadviezen en verschillende factoren die de doorwerking van de adviezen hebben beïnvloed. De beschrijving van het proces vormt ook de basis voor het beantwoorden van de evaluatievragen die ons door de griffie zijn meegegeven. Daarmee komen we toe aan het beantwoorden van de vraag: was de burgerjury een juiste vorm voor burgerparticipatie over het Omgevingsplan en was de koppeling van de burgerjury aan Provinciale Staten een goede keuze