Understanding Information Need

Abstract

The raison d'etre of IR is to satisfy human information need. But, do we really understand information need? Despite advances in the past few decades in both the IR and relevant scientific communities, this question is largely unanswered. We do not really understand how an information need emerges and how it is physically manifested. Information need refers to a complex concept: at the very initial state of the phenomenon (i.e. at a visceral level), even the searcher may not be aware of its existence. This renders the measuring of this concept (using traditional behaviour studies) nearly impossible. In this paper, we investigate the connection between an information need and brain activity. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), we measured the brain activity of twenty four participants while they performed a Question Answering (Q/A) Task, where the questions were carefully selected and developed from TREC-8 and TREC 2001 Q/A Track. The results of this experiment revealed a distributed network of brain regions commonly associated with activities related to information need and retrieval and differing brain activity in processing scenarios when participants knew the answer to a given question and when they did not and needed to search. We believe our study and conclusions constitute an important step in unravelling the nature of information need and therefore better satisfying it.

Neural information retrieval: at the end of the early years

“…Finally, regarding nomenclature, our use of Neural IR, referring to machine learning research on artificial NNs and deep learning, should not be confused with cognitive science research studying actual neural representations of relevance in the human brain (see Moshfeghi et al 2016). In addition, note that the modern appellation of deep learning for the current ''third wave'' of NN research owes to these approaches using a large number of hidden layers in their NN architectures.…”

Neuropsychological model of the realization of information need

“…In the current research, we examine neural correlates of information need and extend a study by Moshfeghi, Triantafillou, and Pollick (2016) that examined two scenarios where brain activity was contrasted between when searchers had an information need and when they did not. In one scenario when searchers had an information need they simply indicated the need to search without engaging in a search process (Question-Response (QR) task -Scenario 1) and in the other scenario when searchers realised an information need they later engaged in a search process (Question-Response-Search (QRS) task-Scenario 2).…”

“…The change between ventral and dorsal posterior cingulate activity was interpreted in the context of the Attention, Breadth and Balance (ABBA) model (Leech & Sharp, 2014) as being consistent with a switch from a narrow internal focus to a broad external focus of attention. In the current study, we revisit the results of Moshfeghi et al (2016) to examine the interaction between these previously reported regions, extending this analysis to include the full search and document evaluation times that followed the QRS task.…”

“…In order to assess the interaction between brain regions revealed from the results of Moshfeghi et al (2016) we measure functional connectivity. Functional connectivity measures the correlation in brain activity between different brain regions (Friston, 2011).…”

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

“…Yashar then explained that in [27], they showed that there are clear, detectable, physical manifestations (i.e. neural correlates) of INs in human brains which can be identified in an early stage of an information seeking and retrieval process and also specific brain regions where INs manifest themselves.…”