Users Interaction with the Hierarchically Structured Presentation in XML Document Retrieval

Krahn

2011

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

This article examines the influence of task type on the users' preferred level of document elements (full articles, sections, or subsections) during interaction with an XMLversion ofWikipedia.We found that in general articles and subsections seemed to be the most valuable elements for our test subjects. For information-gathering tasks, this tendency was stronger, whereas for fact-finding tasks, the sections seemed to play a more important role. We assume from this that users select different information search strategies for the two task types. When dealing with fact-finding tasks, users seem more likely to use one single element as an answer, while when they do information gathering, they pick information from several elements. IntroductionAlthough many information retrieval (IR) systems index and retrieve full documents, they seldom index the entire document and its parts independently. Nevertheless, in many situations, only parts of documents will be relevant to a user's information need. In this article, we report from a study of users' preferences with respect to document parts and how these differ for two types of tasks.XML offers the possibility of indexing and retrieving semantically meaningful document parts (Luk et al., 2002). An essential question is what types of elements in an XML-hierarchy are the most useful for users? In most XMLdocuments, the markup is quite detailed; it is, however, not likely that users are interested in being presented with very small elements such as titles or links. In the context of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval (INEX), several authors have studied which element types users prefer when searching in XML retrieval systems a collection of scientific articles in the domain of informatics (IEEE) were used. A notable exception from the INEXgenerated studies is the study by Balatsoukas and Demian (2010) on XML-coded documentation. It is reasonable to believe that genre will influence the way users read a document, which, in turn, might influence which element types are most appropriate for satisfying an information need. A second influencing factor might be the type of work task for which the information is needed (Byström & Järvelin, 1995), whereas users' topic knowledge (Marchionini, 1995) could be a third factor.In this study, we have investigated test subjects searching an XML-tagged version of Wikipedia. The data were collected in 2007 for the INEX Interactive Track. The search tasks analyzed in this study were categorized as two different types: information gathering and fact-finding. As part of the experiment, the test subjects were asked to fill in a questionnaire on, among other things, their knowledge about the topic, but a preliminary analysis of this data set made it impossible to draw any conclusions. The research questions examined in this study are as follows:• What element types do people use when searching in an XMLversion of Wikipedia? • How does the task type influence users element-type preferences?We begin presenting related studies and th...

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The effect of task type on preferred element types in an XML-based retrieval system

Krahn

2011

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

“…Although there has been variations in task content and focus, some fundamental premises has been in force throughout: a common subject recruiting procedure a common set of user tasks and data collection instruments such as interview guides and questionnaires a common logging procedure for user/system interaction an understanding that collected data should be made available to all participants for analysis This has ensured that through a manageable effort, participant institutions have had access to a rich and comparable set of data on user background and user behavior, of sufficient size and level of detail to allow both qualitative and quantitative analysis. This has already been the source of a number of papers and conference presentations ( [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [15]). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overview of the INEX 2009 Interactive Track

Focused Retrieval and Evaluation

Nordlie

Fuhr

et al. 2010

Abstract. In the paper we present the organization of the INEX 2009 interactive track. For the 2009 experiments the iTrack has gathered data on user search behavior in a collection consisting of book metadata taken from the online bookstore Amazon and the social cataloguing application LibraryThing. Thus the data are more structured than in previous years' experiments, consisting of traditional bibliographic metadata, user-generated tags and reviews and promotional texts and reviews from publishers and professional reviewers. Through monitoring searches based on three different task types the experiment aims at studying how users interact with highly structured data. We describe the methods used for data collection and the tasks performed by the participants. Some preliminary results of the interaction analysis are reported.

“…The authors find that users' topic familiarity is an important factor in estimating the type of task s/he is performing. [22] compared i-track 2004 and 2005 data with respect to how two different interfaces for presentation of query results (unstructured and hierarchically structured) impacts element assessments. The authors found that there was a stronger tendency for searchers to assess section elements, compared to other elements, when elements from the same document were scattered in the result list instead of presented structurally under the full article.…”

Section: Inex I-track Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seven Years of INEX Interactive Retrieval Experiments – Lessons and Challenges

Nordlie

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

2012