In recent years, small screen devices have seen widespread increase in their acceptance and use. Combining mobility with increased technological advances many such devices can now be considered mobile information terminals. However, user interactions with small display devices remain a challenge due to the inherent input restrictions and limited display capabilities. These challenges are particularly evident for tasks, such as information seeking. For the presentation of retrieval results we consider that a personalised and context dependent approach could offer benefits, particularly for retrieving information in a non-traditional environment. As a starting point, in this paper we report an investigation into the effects of summary length as a function of screen size, where query-biased summaries are used to present retrieval results. Following a brief description of our proposed system, we report a user study aimed at exploring whether there is an optimal summary size for three types of device (smartphone, PDA and laptop), given their different screen sizes.

This paper presents the results of a study aimed at measuring the usefulness of presenting the results of an Information B~trieval search on WAP mobile phones. The experimentation focuses on presenting automatically-generated summaries of newspaper articles of increasing length on a mobile phone interface and in studying the differences in users' perception of relevance of the retrieved documents. The aim is to study experimentally how users' perception of relevance varies depending on the length of the summary, and in relation to the specific characteristic of the mobile interface that content is presented. Experimental results suggest that hierarchical query biased summaries are useful when dealing with small screens and assist users in making correct relevance judgments.

In this paper we investigate how information surrogates might be useful in exploratory search and what information it is useful for a surrogate to contain. By comparing assessments based on artificially created information surrogates, we investigate the effect of the source of information, the quality of an information source and the date of information upon the assessment process. We also investigate how varying levels of topical knowledge, assessor confidence and prior expectation affect the assessment of information surrogates. We show that both types of contextual information affect how the information surrogates are judged and what actions are performed as a result of the surrogate

In this paper we investigate the consistency of answer assessment in a complex question answering task examining features of assessor consistency, types of answers and question type.

The paper presents a study investigating the effects of incorporating novelty detection in automatic text summarisation. Condensing a textual document, automatic text summarisation can reduce the need to refer to the source document. It also offers a means to deliver device-friendly content when accessing information in non-traditional environments. An effective method of summarisation could be to produce a summary that includes only novel information. However, a consequence of focusing exclusively on novel parts may result in a loss of context, which may have an impact on the correct interpretation of the summary, with respect to the source document. In this study we compare two strategies to produce summaries that incorporate novelty in different ways: a constant length summary, which contains only novel sentences, and an incremental summary, containing additional sentences that provide context. The aim is to establish whether a summary that contains only novel sentences provides sufficient basis to determine relevance of a document, or if indeed we need to include additional sentences to provide context. Findings from the study seem to suggest that there is only a minimal difference in performance for the tasks we set our users and that the presence of contextual information is not so important. However, for the case of mobile information access, a summary that contains only novel information does offer benefits, given bandwidth constraints.