This paper reports on experiments that attempt
to characterize the relationship between users
and their knowledge of the search topic in a
Question Answering (QA) system. It also
investigates user search behavior with respect
to the length of answers presented by a QA
system. Two lengths of answers were
compared; snippets (one to two sentences of
text) and exact answers. A user test was
conducted, 92 factoid questions were judged
by 44 participants, to explore the participants’
preferences, feelings and opinions about QA
system tasks. The conclusions drawn from the
results were that participants preferred and
obtained higher accuracy in finding answers
from the snippets set. However, accuracy
varied according to users’ topic familiarity;
users were only substantially helped by the
wider context of a snippet if they were already
familiar with the topic of the question, without
such familiarity, users were about as accurate
at locating answers from the snippets as they
were in exact set
