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.     

Personalization of tagging systems

Social media systems have encouraged end user participation in the Internet, for the purpose of storing and distributing Internet content, sharing opinions and maintaining relationships. Collaborative tagging allows users to annotate the resulting user-generated content, and enables effective retrieval of otherwise uncategorised data. However, compared to professional web content production, collaborative tagging systems face the challenge that end-users assign tags in an uncontrolled manner, resulting in unsystematic and inconsistent metadata.This paper introduces a framework for the personalization of social media systems. We pinpoint three tasks that would benefit from personalization: collaborative tagging, collaborative browsing and collaborative search. We propose a ranking model for each task that integrates the individual user’s tagging history in the recommendation of tags and content, to align its suggestions to the individual user preferences. We demonstrate on two real data sets that for all three tasks, the personalized ranking should take into account both the user’s own preference and the opinion of others.     

Task-based evaluation of text summarization using Relevance Prediction

This article introduces a new task-based evaluation measure called Relevance Prediction that is a more intuitive measure of an individual’s performance on a real-world task than interannotator agreement. Relevance Prediction parallels what a user does in the real world task of browsing a set of documents using standard search tools, i.e., the user judges relevance based on a short summary and then that same user—not an independent user—decides whether to open (and judge) the corresponding document. This measure is shown to be a more reliable measure of task performance than LDC Agreement, a current gold-standard based measure used in the summarization evaluation community. Our goal is to provide a stable framework within which developers of new automatic measures may make stronger statistical statements about the effectiveness of their measures in predicting summary usefulness. We demonstrate—as a proof-of-concept methodology for automatic metric developers—that a current automatic evaluation measure has a better correlation with Relevance Prediction than with LDC Agreement and that the significance level for detected differences is higher for the former than for the latter.     

Personalised news and scientific literature aggregation

Content-based filtering can be deployed for personalised information dissemination on the web, but this is a possibility that has been largely ignored. Nowadays, there are no successful content-based filtering applications available online. Nootropia is an immune-inspired user profiling model for content-based filtering. It has the advantageous property to be able to represent a user’s multiple interests and adapt to a variety of changes in them. In this paper we describe our early efforts to develop real world personalisation services based on Nootropia. We present, the architecture, implementation, usage and evaluation of the personalised news and paper aggregator, which aggregates news and papers that are relevant to an individual’s interests. Our user study shows that Nootropia can effectively learn a user’s interests and identify relevant information. It also indicates that information filtering is a complicated task with many factors affecting its successful application in a real situation.     

Exploiting indoor location and mobile information for context-awareness service

Personal mobile devices such as cellular phones, smart phones and PMPs have advanced incredibly in the past decade. The mobile technologies make research on the life log and user-context awareness feasible. In other words, sensors in mobile devices can collect the variety of user’s information, and various works have been conducted using that information. Most of works used a user’s location information as the most useful clue to recognize the user context. However, the location information in the conventional works usually depends on a GPS receiver that has limited function, because it cannot localize a person in a building and thus lowers the performance of the user-context awareness. This paper develops a system to solve such problems and to infer a user’s hidden information more accurately using Bayesian network and indoor-location information. Also, this paper presents a new technique for localization in a building using a decision tree and signals for the Wireless LAN because the decision tree has many advantages which outweigh other localization techniques.     

Integrating expert profile,reputation and link analysis for expert finding in question-answering websites

Question answering websites are becoming an ever more popular knowledge sharing platform. On such websites, people may ask any type of question and then wait for someone else to answer the question. However, in this manner, askers may not obtain correct answers from appropriate experts. Recently, various approaches have been proposed to automatically find experts in question answering websites. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid approach to effectively find experts for the category of the target question in question answering websites. Our approach considers user subject relevance, user reputation and authority of a category in finding experts. A user’s subject relevance denotes the relevance of a user’s domain knowledge to the target question. A user’s reputation is derived from the user’s historical question-answering records, while user authority is derived from link analysis. Moreover, our proposed approach has been extended to develop a question dependent approach that considers the relevance of historical questions to the target question in deriving user domain knowledge, reputation and authority. We used a dataset obtained from Yahoo! Answer Taiwan to evaluate our approach. Our experiment results show that our proposed methods outperform other conventional methods.     

Between traditional classification and coordinate indexing

An ordering system for a global information network is necessary in order to enable the user to retrieve the particular information he is looking for. Classification has been one of the methods of ordering. The principle of traditional classification has been based on the idea of partitioning the universe of knowledge in mutually exclusive classes, i.e. subjects. A particular topic is defined by narrower classification within a class following the principle of ‘genusspecies’ relationship. Ranganathan's system of faceted classification has only replaced the classification of terms into subjects and sub-subjects by classification of terms into five ambiguous categories. Taube's system of coordinate indexing gives full freedom to the user to combine any number of terms of his choice. To be effective for social sciences such a system has to overcome some difficult problems of semantics. The system MANIS described here maintains the traditional classification and yet allows the user to combine terms of his choice, where the choice is restricted to the terms belonging to the system of traditional classification.     

Inferring user knowledge level from eye movement patterns

The acquisition of information and the search interaction process is influenced strongly by a person’s use of their knowledge of the domain and the task. In this paper we show that a user’s level of domain knowledge can be inferred from their interactive search behaviors without considering the content of queries or documents. A technique is presented to model a user’s information acquisition process during search using only measurements of eye movement patterns. In a user study (n = 40) of search in the domain of genomics, a representation of the participant’s domain knowledge was constructed using self-ratings of knowledge of genomics-related terms (n = 409). Cognitive effort features associated with reading eye movement patterns were calculated for each reading instance during the search tasks. The results show correlations between the cognitive effort due to reading and an individual’s level of domain knowledge. We construct exploratory regression models that suggest it is possible to build models that can make predictions of the user’s level of knowledge based on real-time measurements of eye movement patterns during a task session.     

A graphical database interface for casual, naive users

This paper is concerned with some aspects of database interfaces for casual, naive users. A “casual user” is defined as an individual who wishes to execute queries once or twice a month, and a “naive user” is someone who has little or no expertise in operating computers. The study focuses on a specific group of casual, naive users, analyzes their needs and proposes a solution. The proposed interface consists of a graphical display of a model of a database and a natural language query language. One of the unique properties of the database interface is that it allows the user to see local item names within the context of a global structure. The interface was then tested to determine whether it was acceptable to the user population and to discover the level of graphical model that the users would find most comfortable.     

Hybrid clustering for validation and improvement of subject-classification schemes

A hybrid text/citation-based method is used to cluster journals covered by the Web of Science database in the period 2002–2006. The objective is to use this clustering to validate and, if possible, to improve existing journal-based subject-classification schemes. Cross-citation links are determined on an item-by-paper procedure for individual papers assigned to the corresponding journal. Text mining for the textual component is based on the same principle; textual characteristics of individual papers are attributed to the journals in which they have been published. In a first step, the 22-field subject-classification scheme of the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) is evaluated and visualised. In a second step, the hybrid clustering method is applied to classify the about 8300 journals meeting the selection criteria concerning continuity, size and impact. The hybrid method proves superior to its two components when applied separately. The choice of 22 clusters also allows a direct field-to-cluster comparison, and we substantiate that the science areas resulting from cluster analysis form a more coherent structure than the “intellectual” reference scheme, the ESI subject scheme. Moreover, the textual component of the hybrid method allows labelling the clusters using cognitive characteristics, while the citation component allows visualising the cross-citation graph and determining representative journals suggested by the PageRank algorithm. Finally, the analysis of journal ‘migration’ allows the improvement of existing classification schemes on the basis of the concordance between fields and clusters.     

A comparative survey of Personalised Information Retrieval and Adaptive Hypermedia techniques

A key driver for next generation web information retrieval systems is becoming the degree to which a user’s search and presentation experience is adapted to individual user properties and contexts of use. Over the past decades, two parallel threads of personalisation research have emerged, one originating in the document space in the area of Personalised Information Retrieval (PIR) and the other arising from the hypertext space in the field of Adaptive Hypermedia (AH).     

传统图书馆分类法的网络适用性研究

电子版图书馆分类法的编制和应用，使联机分类数据在计算机情报检索系统中的作用得到提升。因特网和WWW等网络资源的增长，新的网络信息技术和信息检索工具给图书馆分类法提出了新问题，将其与“网络目录”的对应比较可知，传统图书馆分类法的网络应用适应性，以及今后要成为面向传统文献及网络资源的统一检索界面，所应注意改进的方向。     

Experiments in discourse analysis impact on information classification and retrieval algorithms

Researchers in indexing and retrieval systems have been advocating the inclusion of more contextual information to improve results. The proliferation of full-text databases and advances in computer storage capacity have made it possible to carry out text analysis by means of linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge. Since the mid 80s, research has tended to pay more attention to context, giving discourse analysis a more central role. The research presented in this paper aims to check whether discourse variables have an impact on modern information retrieval and classification algorithms. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, a functional framework for information analysis in an automated environment has been proposed, where the n-grams (filtering) and the k-means and Chen’s classification algorithms have been tested against sub-collections of documents based on the following discourse variables: “Genre”, “Register”, “Domain terminology”, and “Document structure”. The results obtained with the algorithms for the different sub-collections were compared to the MeSH information structure. These demonstrate that n-grams does not appear to have a clear dependence on discourse variables, though the k-means classification algorithm does, but only on domain terminology and document structure, and finally Chen’s algorithm has a clear dependence on all of the discourse variables. This information could be used to design better classification algorithms, where discourse variables should be taken into account. Other minor conclusions drawn from these results are also presented.     

基于语义网的网络智能导航系统研究

针对网络智能导航不能根据用户的真实需求,将用户快速、准确地引领到目的地的情况,提出一种基于语义网的网络智能导航系统。通过建立网络信息语义模型和用户需求语义模型,在网络信息和用户之间构建导航语义网,将用户文字描述的具体需求准确理解并输入到导航语义网,在导航语义网中完整理解导航需求,准确实现用户对信息搜索的导航。     

Validation and interpretation of Web users’ sessions clusters

Understanding users’ navigation on the Web is important towards improving the quality of information and the speed of accessing large-scale Web data sources. Clustering of users’ navigation into sessions has been proposed in order to identify patterns and similarities which are then managed in the context of Web users oriented applications (searching, e-commerce, etc.). This paper deals with the problem of assessing the quality of user session clusters in order to make inferences regarding the users’ navigation behavior. A common model-based clustering algorithm is used to result in clusters of Web users’ sessions. These clusters are validated by using a statistical test, which measures the distances of the clusters’ distributions to infer their dissimilarity and distinguishing level. Furthermore, a visualization method is proposed in order to interpret the relation between clusters. Using real data sets, we illustrate how the proposed analysis can be applied in popular application scenarios to reveal valuable associations among Web users’ navigation sessions.     

The relation between the category of the ‘need’ and the category of the ‘demand’ for information

This paper examines the terminological confusion underlying the study of information use, and reviews the major studies in the field. The conclusion is that confusion in research methods is inextricably linked to a lack of clarity in terminology. Attention is drawn to the significance of different social and cultural contexts in shaping ‘information needs’, and a research scheme is evolved for the study of users of ‘professional information’ in Poland.     

TaxoFolk: a hybrid taxonomy–folksonomy classification for enhanced knowledge navigation

Taxonomy is widely used in many of the website and directory navigation schemes for content/knowledge retrieval. However, information or content navigation support through taxonomy is often constrained due to its inability to take into account the full nomenclature and cultural nuances of knowledge seekers. The emergence and increasing adoption of collaborative tagging (social bookmarking) tools have provided lightweight and informal conceptual structures called folksonomies for knowledge retrieval. As for folksonomies, they reflect the vocabulary of the users. Hence, integrating folksonomies into a taxonomy combines the best of the two schemes as the resultant structure enhances taxonomy navigation with personsalisation for knowledge search and retrieval. This paper presents TaxoFolk, an algorithm for deriving hybrid taxonomy-folksonomy classification for enhanced knowledge navigation. The algorithm integrates folksonomy with a taxonomy through several unsupervised data mining techniques with augmented heuristics.