Human-computer interaction in information seeking tasks

The third in a series of experiments utilizing a simulated online bibliographic information seeking environment called DBASE is discussed. Variables considered in the study are computer aiding, availability of citation lists, data base structure, and type of search task. Effects of these variables on six performance measures are examined using analysis of variance. Linear discriminant analysis is utilized to provide a more fine-grained analysis of important problem features and to form a basis for investigating differences among individual searchers and the dynamic nature of information seeking tasks.     

A faceted approach to conceptualizing tasks in information seeking

The nature of the task that leads a person to engage in information interaction, as well as of information seeking and searching tasks, have been shown to influence individuals’ information behavior. Classifying tasks in a domain has been viewed as a departure point of studies on the relationship between tasks and human information behavior. However, previous task classification schemes either classify tasks with respect to the requirements of specific studies or merely classify a certain category of task. Such approaches do not lead to a holistic picture of task since a task involves different aspects. Therefore, the present study aims to develop a faceted classification of task, which can incorporate work tasks and information search tasks into the same classification scheme and characterize tasks in such a way as to help people make predictions of information behavior. For this purpose, previous task classification schemes and their underlying facets are reviewed and discussed. Analysis identifies essential facets and categorizes them into Generic facets of task and Common attributes of task. Generic facets of task include Source of task, Task doer, Time, Action, Product, and Goal. Common attributes of task includes Task characteristics and User’s perception of task. Corresponding sub-facets and values are identified as well. In this fashion, a faceted classification of task is established which could be used to describe users’ work tasks and information search tasks. This faceted classification provides a framework to further explore the relationships among work tasks, search tasks, and interactive information retrieval and advance adaptive IR systems design.     

Task complexity, problem structure and information actions: Integrating studies on information seeking and retrieval

Analyzing actions to be supported by information and information retrieval (IR) systems is vital for understanding the needs of different types of information, search strategies and relevance assessments, in short, understanding IR. A necessary condition for this understanding is to link results from information seeking studies to the body of knowledge by IR studies. The actions to be focused on in this paper are tasks from the angle of problem solving. I will analyze certain features of work tasks and relate these features to types of information people are looking for and using in their tasks, patterning of search strategies for obtaining information and relevance assessments in choosing retrieved documents. The major claim is that these information activities are systematically connected to task complexity and structure of the problem at hand. The argumentation is based on both theoretical and empirical results from studies on information retrieval and seeking.     

A note on the nature of creativity in engineering: Implications for supporting system design

It has been suggested that emerging “intelligent” systems for computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) have the potential for hindering and/or usurping designers' creativity. This issue is explored by pursuing the nature of creativity in engineering design in terms of those behaviors that tend to be associated with individuals who are judged to be creative. The characterizations of creative behavior that result are discussed in terms of their implications for the development and implementation of computer-based support systems for designers.     

Children’s interaction with cross-cultural and multilingual digital libraries. II. Information seeking,success, and affective experience

This paper reports the results of a study that investigated Arabic-speaking children’s interaction with the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) to find Arabic books on four tasks. Children’s information seeking activities was captured by using HyperCam software. Children’s success was assessed based on a measure the researchers developed. Children’s perceptions of and affective experience in using the ICDL was gathered through group interviews. Findings revealed that children’s information seeking behavior was characterized by browsing using a single function; that is, looking under “Arabic” from the Simple interface pull-down menu. Children were more successful on the fully self-generated, open-ended task than on the assigned and semi-assigned tasks. Children made suggestions for improving the Arabic collection and the design of the ICDL. The findings have implications for practitioners, researchers, and system designers.     

Let’s search together,but not too close! An analysis of communication and performance in collaborative information seeking

Communication is considered to be one of the most essential components of collaboration, but our understanding as to which form of communication provides the most optimal cost-benefit balance lacks severely. To help investigate effects of various communication channels on a collaborative project, we conducted a user study with 30 pairs (60 participants) in three different conditions – co-located, remotely located with text chat, and remotely located with text as well as audio chat, in an exploratory search task. Using both quantitative and qualitative data analysis, we found that teams with remotely located participants were more effective in terms of being able to explore more diverse information. Adding audio support for remote collaboration helped participants to lower their cognitive load as well as negative emotions compared to those working in the same space. We also show how these findings could help design more effective systems for collaborative information seeking tasks using adequate and appropriate communication. We argue that collaboration is an important aspect of human-centered IR, and that our work provides interesting insights into people doing information seeking/retrieval in collaboration.     

A Comparison Between the Provision of Information to Engineering Designers in the UK and the USA

Understanding the information accessing activities of engineering designers has been a topic of considerable interest both to industrialists and researchers alike in forming the basic requirements and specification for document management systems, engineering database management systems and information delivery systems. As part of this effort studies have been undertaken to establish how the designers themselves access and distribute this information. However, such studies have been specific to the host country in which the research was originated and comparisons with the wider design community across the world have not possible to establish or quantify. This paper will present the salient findings and observations of a global comparison between engineering designers working within the UK and USA. It is based on two questionnaire surveys, one undertaken in each of the two countries, where over 300 designers were questioned. Thus, it is anticipated that this paper would serve to enhance the management of information and the associated information delivery systems on a world-wide basis.     

Examining users’ knowledge change in the task completion process

This paper examines the changes of information searchers’ topic knowledge levels in the process of completing information tasks. Multi-session tasks were used in the study, which enables the convenience of eliciting users’ topic knowledge during their process of completing the whole tasks. The study was a 3-session laboratory experiment with 24 participants, each time working on one subtask in an assigned 3-session general task. The general task was either parallel or dependently structured. Questionnaires were administered before and after each session to elicit users’ perceptions of their knowledge levels, task attributes, and other task features, for both the overall task and the sub-tasks. Our results support the assumption that users’ knowledge generally increases after each search session, but there were exceptions in which a “ceiling” effect was shown. We also found that knowledge was correlated with users’ perceptions of task attributes and accomplishment. In addition, task type was found to affect several aspects of knowledge levels and knowledge change. These findings further our understanding of users’ knowledge in information tasks and are thus helpful for information retrieval research and system design.     

How is professionals’ information seeking shaped by workplace procedures? A study of healthcare clinicians

Professional work is often regulated by procedures that shape the information seeking involved in performing a task. Yet, research on professionals’ information seeking tends to bypass procedures and depict information seeking as an informal activity. In this study we analyze two healthcare tasks governed by procedures: triage and timeouts. While information seeking is central to both procedures, we find that the coordinating nurses rarely engage in information seeking when they triage patients. Inversely, the physicians value convening for timeouts to seek information. To explain these findings we distinguish between junior and expert professionals and between uncertain and equivocal tasks. The triage procedure specifies which information to retrieve but expert professionals such as the coordinating nurses tend to perform triage, which is an uncertain task, by holistic pattern recognition rather than information seeking. For timeouts, which target an equivocal task, the procedure facilitates information seeking by creating a space for open-ended collaborative reflection. Both junior and expert physicians temporarily suspend patient treatment in favor of this opportunity to reflect on their actions, though partly for different reasons. We discuss implications for models of professionals’ information seeking.     

Understanding the seeking-encountering tension: Roles of foreground and background task urgency

Echoing the urge for in-depth research on the mechanisms of the seeking-encountering tension, i.e., foreground and background tasks co-exist and switch between each other, this study conducted a true experiment based on 2*2 factorial design to examine the roles of task urgency in such tension. The experiment used an eye tracker and the build-in screen recorder to capture 39 participants’ eye movements and clicking behavior when they performed foreground search tasks in the laboratory, while the information related to the background task assigned in advance as coursework was embedded in the search results. It was found that the information seeking and encountering processes were interwoven and competed persistently with each other for users’ attention and actions, and the seeking-encountering tension led to a lose-lose outcome. While there existed negative relationships between foreground task urgency and multiple search measures, positive relationships were revealed between background task urgency and the examining of the encountered information. In particular, the high foreground task urgency suppressed the noticing of the stimulus related to the background task. The results not only enrich the understanding of multitasking in human information acquisition, but also generate useful practical implications for the design of search engines.     

Search history support for finding and using information: User interface design recommendations from a user study

Recording search histories, presenting them to the searcher, and building additional interface tools on them offer many opportunities for supporting user tasks in information seeking and use. This study investigated the use of search history information in legal information seeking. Qualitative methods were used to explore how attorneys and law librarians used their memory and external memory aids while searching for information and in transferring to information use. Based on the findings, interface design recommendations were made for information systems.     

Studying health anxiety related attentional bias during online health information seeking: Impacts of stages and task types

Seeking online health information may reinforce the anxiety of those who are already overly anxious about their health. This study explored how people with health anxiety may behave differently in terms of their attentional biases when seeking health information online. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 17 participants in the high health anxious group and 17 participants in the low health anxious group, who performed three types of information-seeking tasks (factual, interpretive, and exploratory) on a Chinese health website. We observed that both groups mainly allocated their attention to the stages of evaluating the list of search results and synthesizing information to make health decisions. They showed similar attention tracks at the earlier search stages and health anxiety was found to associate with attentional biases towards certain website stimuli. However, the high health anxious group showed more active eye movements than their low health anxious counterparts. Attentional biases from the high health anxious group mainly occurred at the later stage of processing rather than the initial orientation stages. As for task types, the high health anxious group presented more extensive attentional biases when performing the interpretive task, compared to the explorative and factual tasks. The findings provide novel insights into the attentional biases of people with health anxiety as they search online for health information, which have implications on designing more effective information interventions for vulnerable groups of health information consumers. The findings can also help clinicians interpret patients’ anxiety-related sensations and provide intervening recommendations for clients in use of online health information.     

Multi-facet product information search and retrieval using semantically annotated product family ontology

With the advent of various services and applications of Semantic Web, semantic annotation has emerged as an important research topic. The application of semantically annotated ontology had been evident in numerous information processing and retrieval tasks. One of such tasks is utilizing the semantically annotated ontology in product design which is able to suggest many important applications that are critical to aid various design related tasks. However, ontology development in design engineering remains a time consuming and tedious task that demands considerable human efforts. In the context of product family design, management of different product information that features efficient indexing, update, navigation, search and retrieval across product families is both desirable and challenging. For instance, an efficient way of retrieving timely information on product family can be useful for tasks such as product family redesign and new product variant derivation when requirements change. However, the current research and application of information search and navigation in product family is mostly limited to its structural aspect which is insufficient to handle advanced information search especially when the query targets at multiple aspects of a product. This paper attempts to address this problem by proposing an information search and retrieval framework based on the semantically annotated multi-facet product family ontology. Particularly, we propose a document profile (DP) model to suggest semantic tags for annotation purpose. Using a case study of digital camera families, we illustrate how the faceted search and retrieval of product information can be accomplished. We also exemplify how we can derive new product variants based on the designer’s query of requirements via the faceted search and retrieval of product family information. Lastly, in order to highlight the value of our current work, we briefly discuss some further research and applications in design decision support, e.g. commonality analysis and variety comparison, based on the semantically annotated multi-facet product family ontology.     

Extractive speech summarization using evaluation metric-related training criteria

The purpose of extractive speech summarization is to automatically select a number of indicative sentences or paragraphs (or audio segments) from the original spoken document according to a target summarization ratio and then concatenate them to form a concise summary. Much work on extractive summarization has been initiated for developing machine-learning approaches that usually cast important sentence selection as a two-class classification problem and have been applied with some success to a number of speech summarization tasks. However, the imbalanced-data problem sometimes results in a trained speech summarizer with unsatisfactory performance. Furthermore, training the summarizer by improving the associated classification accuracy does not always lead to better summarization evaluation performance. In view of such phenomena, we present in this paper an empirical investigation of the merits of two schools of training criteria to alleviate the negative effects caused by the aforementioned problems, as well as to boost the summarization performance. One is to learn the classification capability of a summarizer on the basis of the pair-wise ordering information of sentences in a training document according to a degree of importance. The other is to train the summarizer by directly maximizing the associated evaluation score or optimizing an objective that is linked to the ultimate evaluation. Experimental results on the broadcast news summarization task suggest that these training criteria can give substantial improvements over a few existing summarization methods.     

Search tactics used in solving everyday how-to technical tasks: Repertoire,selection and tenacity

With greater access to computational resources, people use search to address many everyday challenges in their lives, including solving technology problems. Although there are now many useful ‘how-to’ resources online (especially videos on YouTube), it can still be difficult to identify, understand, and resolve certain kinds of technical problem. While research tasks have been studied for many years and we know the tactics people use, we know far less about searchers’ tactics for how-to technical tasks that involve actually being able to apply found information to resolve a problem. Crucial to our study was developing and studying a highly realistic, how-to technical task, for which there was no single guidance resource: making a phone safe for a child. After providing 39 participants with an actual phone to fix, and a search engine to perform the task, we analysed their search tactics using retrospective cued think aloud interviews. Our primary contribution is a set of 77 tactics used, in three categories, along with detail of how common they were. We conclude that people had a lot of tactics in their repertoire. Although it was not hard for participants to find relevant information, what was hard was for participants to find information they could use; indeed only 23% of participants successfully completed the entire task. Domain knowledge affected the choice of tactics used (although not necessarily towards better task success). We discuss these influences and make design recommendations for how future search systems can support those in resolving how-to technical tasks.     

Implicit information need as explicit problems,help, and behavioral signals

Information need is one of the most fundamental aspects of information seeking, which traditionally conceptualizes as the initiation phase of an individual’s information seeking behavior. However, the very elusive and inexpressible nature of information need makes it hard to elicit from the information seeker or to extract through an automated process. One approach to understanding how a person realizes and expresses information need is to observe their seeking behaviors, to engage processes with information retrieval systems, and to focus on situated performative actions. Using Dervin’s Sense-Making theory and conceptualization of information need based on existing studies, the work reported here tries to understand and explore the concept of information need from a fresh methodological perspective by examining users’ perceived barriers and desired helps in different stages of information search episodes through the analyses of various implicit and explicit user search behaviors. In a controlled lab study, each participant performed three simulated online information search tasks. Participants’ implicit behaviors were collected through search logs, and explicit feedback was elicited through pre-task and post-task questionnaires. A total of 208 query segments were logged, along with users’ annotations on perceived problems and help. Data collected from the study was analyzed by applying both quantitative and qualitative methods. The findings identified several behaviors – such as the number of bookmarks, query length, number of the unique queries, time spent on search results observed in the previous segment, the current segment, and throughout the session – strongly associated with participants’ perceived barriers and help needed. The findings also showed that it is possible to build accurate predictive models to infer perceived problems of articulation of queries, useless and irrelevant information, and unavailability of information from users’ previous segment, current segment, and whole session behaviors. The findings also demonstrated that by combining perceived problem(s) and search behavioral features, it was possible to infer users’ needed help(s) in search with a certain level of accuracy (78%).     

Meta-prompt based learning for low-resource false information detection

The wide spread of false information has detrimental effects on society, and false information detection has received wide attention. When new domains appear, the relevant labeled data is scarce, which brings severe challenges to the detection. Previous work mainly leverages additional data or domain adaptation technology to assist detection. The former would lead to a severe data burden; the latter underutilizes the pre-trained language model because there is a gap between the downstream task and the pre-training task, which is also inefficient for model storage because it needs to store a set of parameters for each domain. To this end, we propose a meta-prompt based learning (MAP) framework for low-resource false information detection. We excavate the potential of pre-trained language models by transforming the detection tasks into pre-training tasks by constructing template. To solve the problem of the randomly initialized template hindering excavation performance, we learn optimal initialized parameters by borrowing the benefit of meta learning in fast parameter training. The combination of meta learning and prompt learning for the detection is non-trivial: Constructing meta tasks to get initialized parameters suitable for different domains and setting up the prompt model’s verbalizer for classification in the noisy low-resource scenario are challenging. For the former, we propose a multi-domain meta task construction method to learn domain-invariant meta knowledge. For the latter, we propose a prototype verbalizer to summarize category information and design a noise-resistant prototyping strategy to reduce the influence of noise data. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate the superiority of the MAP in new domains of false information detection.     

Designing to support situation awareness across distances: an example from a scientific collaboratory

When collaborating, individuals rely on situation awareness (the gathering, incorporation and utilization of environmental information) to help them combine their unique knowledge and skills and achieve their goals. When collaborating across distances, situation awareness is mediated by technology. There are few guidelines to help system analysts design systems or applications that support the creation and maintenance of situation awareness for teams or groups. We propose a framework to guide design decisions to enhance computer-mediated situation awareness during scientific research collaboration. The foundation for this framework is previous research in situation awareness and virtual reality, combined with our analysis of interviews with and observations of collaborating scientists. The framework suggests that situation awareness is comprised of contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information. Research in virtual reality systems suggests control, sensory, distraction and realism attributes of technology contribute to a sense of presence [Presence 7 (1998) 225]. We suggest that consideration of these attributes with respect to contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information provides insights to guide design decisions. We used the framework when designing a scientific collaboratory system. Results from a controlled experimental evaluation of the collaboratory system help illustrate the framework's utility.     

Factors affecting assigned information problem ordering during Web search: An exploratory study

Multitasking is the human ability to handle the demands of multiple tasks. Multitasking behavior involves the ordering of multiple tasks and switching between tasks. People often multitask when using information retrieval (IR) technologies as they seek information on more than one information problem over single or multiple search episodes. However, limited studies have examined how people order their information problems, especially during their Web search engine interaction. The aim of our exploratory study was to investigate assigned information problem ordering by forty (40) study participants engaged in Web search. Findings suggest that assigned information problem ordering was influenced by the following factors, including personal interest, problem knowledge, perceived level of information available on the Web, ease of finding information, level of importance and seeking information on information problems in order from general to specific. Personal interest and problem knowledge were the major factors during assigned information problem ordering. Implications of the findings and further research are discussed. The relationship between information problem ordering and gratification theory is an important area for further exploration.     

网络用户对在线医评信息查寻过程的实验研究

[目的/意义]作为健康信息的一种,在线医评信息对用户医疗决策十分重要。研究用户查寻在线医评信息的过程,挖掘存在的障碍,有助于优化医评网站设计、促进医生在线服务和满足用户健康信息查寻需求。[方法/过程]采用检索实验、内容分析、发声思考和问卷调查等方法,从查寻表现、查寻阶段和查寻障碍3个方面分析在线医评信息这一特定情景下用户的查寻行为及存在问题。[结果/结论]结果显示教育水平和健康信息检索技能与在线医评信息查寻表现正向相关。在线医评信息查寻过程模型包括医生初筛、医评信息检索、浏览、对比、验证和利用6个阶段。健康信息检索技能和甄别能力弱、医评网站评论数量少、医院官网和医评网站可用性差以及医评网站与线下医疗服务融合程度低是影响用户查寻在线医评信息的主要障碍。