Ask for Information Retrieval: Part I. Background and Theory

Abstract

We report the results of a British Library Research and Development Department funded design study for an interactive information retrieval system which will determine structural representations of the anomalous states of knowledge (ASKs) underlying information needs, and attempt to resolve the anomalies through a variety of retrieval strategies performed on a database of documents represented in compatible structural formats. Part I discusses the background to the project and the theory underlying it, Part II (next issue) presents our methods, results and conclusions. Basic premises of the project were: that information needs are not in principle precisely specifiable; that it is possible to elicit problem statements from information system users from which representations of the ASK underlying the need can be derived; that there are classes of ASKs; and, that all elements of information retrieval systems ought to be based on the user's ASK. We have developed a relatively freeform interview technique for eliciting problem statements, and a statistical word co-occurrence analysis for deriving network representations of the problem statements and abstracts. Structural characteristics of the representations have been used to determine classes of ASKs, and both ASK and information structures have been evaluated by, respectively, users and authors. Some results are: that interviewing appears to be a satisfactory technique for eliciting problem statements from which ASKs can be determined; that the statistical analysis produces structures which are generally appropriate both for documents and problem statements; that ASKs thus represented can be usefully classified according to their structural characteristics; and, that of thirty-five subjects, only two had ASKs for which traditional 'best match' retrieval would be intuitively appropriate. The results of the design study indicate that at least some of our premises are reasonable, and that an ASK-based information retrieval system is at least feasible. INTRODUCTIONIMPROVEMENTS IN THE performance of information retrieval (IR) systems as presently designed seem to be limited to only marginal gains in terms of complete recall and precision or complete user satisfaction (see, e.g. Robertson and Sparck Jones1). In these two papers (Part II: Results of a design study, to appear in Journal of Documentation, vol. 38 no. 3) we report on a design study2 for an experimental IR system based on radically different hypotheses than those underlying present systems, which we think may allow the design of IR systems which produce significantly better performance than currently offered.

A Comparative Study of the Effectiveness of Search Result Presentation on the Web

“…From a cognitive perspective, it has been termed that there is a gap in users' knowledge and the information is needed to fill this gap [3]. Finding relevant information may require running several queries, making judgments on the usefulness of documents returned, and reading many documents.…”

“…The first one is that formulating a good query is proved to be cognitively challenging task for users [3]. Often queries are approximations of their underlying need and hence the whole information seeking process is iterative in nature [4].…”

Information Behavior – Ein zentrales Forschungsthema der Informationswissenschaft

“…Dieser Versuch, eine Unterdisziplin der Informationswissenschaft abzustecken, ermöglichte die Konvergenz von Forschungsinitiativen, die ursprünglich von disparaten Standpunkten ausgegangen waren. Der "Cognitive Turn" (Ingwersen 1996) in der Informationswissenschaft, maßgeblich beeinflusst von Belkins Modell des "anomalous state of knowledge" (Belkin et al 1982), der Alternativen zum systemorientierten Ansatz eröffnen sollte, musste letztendlich in eine verhaltensorientierte Forschung münden, da sich, wie oben schon angemerkt, kognitive Zustände einer direkten Beobachtung entziehen und nur indirekt aus dem Verhalten der Probanden erschließbar sind. Letztlich erschließen sich Wissen und Informationslücken aus der Interaktion der Probanden mit Texten.…”

Changing reference service environment: A review of perspectives from managers, librarians, and users

“…46 Nicholas J. Belkin and his colleagues suggested a concept similar to the "visceral need:" the ASK (anomalous states of knowledge). 47 It is based on the idea that people engage in information-seeking behavior because their states of knowledge concerning some particular situation or topic are recognized as being insufficient or inadequate. That is, there are anomalies (e.g., gaps, uncertainties, and lack of concepts) in people' s state of knowledge.…”