Intermediary's Elicitation and Patron's Retrieval Satisfaction

[[abstract]]An elicitation is a verbal request for information reflecting one's interests, concerns or perplexities in conversation. Elicitation behavior in studies of information retrieval interaction is, in fact, the micro-level of information-seeking behavior in which the user and the intermediary exchange information to fill the gaps in one's internal state of knowledge. This study aims to understand the intermediary's elicitation behavior in terms of linguistic forms, communicative functions (illocutionary force) and utterance purposes (semantic contents) and further to identify the relationship between intermediary's individual differences and search results satisfaction. Research methods include participatory observation, conversation analysis, content analysis and statistical analysis of elicitation frequencies and questionnaires. Our research results successfully identify the three dimensions of intermediary's elicitation behavior and characterize intermediary's inquiring minds and elicitation styles. Further analysis shows that there exists a significant relationship between inquiring minds/elicitation styles and user's relevance judgment of search results.

Sets of constant distance from a Jordan curve

We study the $\epsilon$-level sets of the signed distance function to a planar Jordan curve $\Gamma$, and ask what properties of $\Gamma$ ensure that the $\epsilon$-level sets are Jordan curves, or uniform quasicircles, or uniform chord-arc curves for all sufficiently small $\epsilon$. Sufficient conditions are given in term of a scaled invariant parameter for measuring the local deviation of subarcs from their chords. The chordal conditions given are sharp

Thermodynamics of the Schwarzschild-AdS black hole with a minimal length

Using the mass-smeared scheme of black holes, we study the thermodynamics of black holes. Two interesting models are considered. One is the self-regular Schwarzschild-AdS black hole whose mass density is given by the analogue to probability densities of quantum hydrogen atoms. The other model is the same black hole but whose mass density is chosen to be a rational fractional function of radial coordinates. Both mass densities are in fact analytic expressions of the ${\delta}$-function. We analyze the phase structures of the two models by investigating the heat capacity at constant pressure and the Gibbs free energy in an isothermal-isobaric ensemble. Both models fail to decay into the pure thermal radiation even with the positive Gibbs free energy due to the existence of a minimal length. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to a general mass-smeared form that is also associated with the ${\delta}$-function, and indicate the similar thermodynamic properties for various possible mass-smeared forms based on the ${\delta}$-function.Comment: v1: 25 pages, 14 figures; v2: 26 pages, 15 figures; v3: minor revisions, final version to appear in Adv. High Energy Phy

Scalar Boundary Conditions in Hyperscaling Violating Geometry

We study the possible boundary conditions of scalar field modes in a hyperscaling violation(HV) geometry with Lifshitz dynamical exponent $z (z\geqslant1)$ and hyperscaling violation exponent $\theta (\theta\neq0)$. For the case with $\theta>0$, we show that in the parameter range with $1\leq z\leq 2,~-z+d-12,~-z+d-1<\theta\leq d-1$, the boundary conditions have different types, including the Neumann, Dirichlet and Robin conditions, while in the range with $\theta\leq-z+d-1$, only Dirichlet type condition can be set. In particular, we further confirm that the mass of the scalar field does not play any role in determining the possible boundary conditions for $\theta>0$, which has been addressed in Ref. \cite{1201.1905}. Meanwhile, we also do the parallel investigation in the case with $\theta<0$. We find that for $m^2<0$, three types of boundary conditions are available, but for $m^2>0$, only one type is available.Comment: 19 page