From Exploration to Sensemaking: an Interactive Exploratory Search System

exist to satisfy people's information needs. Many search systems have been designed for well-formed and explicit information needs but few for exploratory purposes. By exploration, we mean the information need is ambiguous initially and evolves during the search process. There are mainly two parts within the thesis. In the first part, we will develop an interactive exploratory search system for the arXiv database, an open e-print archive for scientific articles. The part is mostly based on an initial study, in which a search engine, Scinet, based on an intent estimation model is proposed. With this search engine, users can direct their exploration by giving feedbacks to the estimated search intents, which are represented by relevant keywords. Intents are visualized and arranged into a radial layout where the radius measures relevance and the angle measures similarity. Users can drag a keyword closer to the center to indicate higher relevance or click on a keyword to assign full relevance and then the retrieved documents will be updated accordingly. Compared to the initial search system, a mind-map functionality is also added as a new feature. With this mind-map, users can temporarily store the keywords or titles that they find interesting. To verify the interactive exploratory ability, we have designed and conducted a small-scale experiment based on the arXiv dataset. Particularly, the keywords for arXiv articles are extracted by an automatic keyword extraction algorithm since most of the arXiv articles do not provide keywords by the authors. For the second part, we investigate a potential novel functionality of the Scinet search system on a large database of scientific articles. The ability of the system to support information seeking was shown in previous publication. Here we propose that this system will also support sensemaking, namely, help users to make sense of the results. We suggest that this advantage arises because in Scinet, not only are intents estimated but also the relationships between them are indicated on the interface. In order to better support sensemaking, the new functionality is also added to the prototype system in the initial study. We believe that this search system will help people to better understand and interpret the search results

The effects of contract detail and prior ties on contract change : a learning perspective

Despite the large literature on alliance contract design, we know little about how transacting parties change and amend their underlying contracts during the execution of strategic alliances. Drawing on existing research in the alliance contracting literature, we develop the empirical question of how contract detail and prior ties influence the amount, direction, and type of change in such agreements during the collaboration. We generated a sample of 115 joint ventures (JVs) by distributing a survey to JV board members or top managers and found that the amount of contract change is negatively associated with the level of detail in the initial contract but is positively associated with the number of prior ties between alliance partners. In relation to the direction of contract change, we find that the level of detail of the initial agreements negatively correlates with the likelihood of removing or weakening existing provisions and that prior collaborative experience positively correlates with the likelihood of strengthening of existing provisions or adding of new ones. We also find that prior ties affect the type of change in that JV parents prefer to change enforcement provisions more so than the coordination provisions in the contract. Our paper generates new insights on the complementarities between relational governance and transaction cost economics perspectives on alliance contracting

A Model of Two-Way Selection System for Human Behavior

We propose a model of two-way selection system. It appears in the processes like choosing a mate between men and women, making contracts between job hunters and recruiters, and trading between buyers and sellers. In this paper, we propose a model of two-way selection system, and present its analytic solution for the expectation of successful matching total and the regular pattern that the matching rate trends toward an inverse proportion to either the ratio between the two sides or the ratio of the state total to the smaller people number. The proposed model is verified by empirical data of the matchmaking fairs. Results indicate that the model well predicts this typical real-world two- way selection behavior to the bounded error extent, thus it is helpful for understanding the dynamics mechanism of the real-world two-way selection system.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure