A competitive environment for exploratory query expansion

ABSTRACT

Most information workers query digital libraries many times a day. Yet people have little opportunity to hone their skills in a controlled environment, or compare their performance with others in an objective way. Conversely, although search engine logs record how users evolve queries, they lack crucial information about the user's intent. This paper describes an environment for exploratory query expansion that pits users against each other and lets them compete, and practice, in their own time and on their own workstation. The system captures query evolution behavior on predetermined information-seeking tasks. It is publicly available, and the code is open source so that others can set up their own competitive environments.

REFERENCES

• 1: Luis von Ahn , Laura Dabbish, Labeling images with a computer game, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.319-326, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985733]
• 2: Allan, J. (2005) HARD Track overview in TREC 2005 high accuracy retrieval from documents. Proc of TREC-2005.
• 3: Timothy Chklovski, Collecting paraphrase corpora from volunteer contributors, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Knowledge capture, October 02-05, 2005, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1088622.1088644]
• 4: Dave Crane , Eric Pascarello , Darren James, Ajax in Action, Manning Publications Co., Greenwich, CT, 2005
• 5: Bernard J. Jansen , Amanda Spink , Tefko Saracevic, Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.36 n.2, p.207-227, Jan.1.2000 [doi>10.1016/S0306-4573(99)00056-4]
• 6: Kapoun, J. M. (1995) Re-thinking the Library Pathfinder, College & Undergraduate Libraries 2(1) 93--105.
• 7: Diane Kelly , Xin Fu, Eliciting better information need descriptions from users of information search systems, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.43 n.1, p.30-46, January 2007 [doi>10.1016/j.ipm.2006.03.006]
• 8: David N. Milne , Ian H. Witten , David M. Nichols, A knowledge-based search engine powered by wikipedia, Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management, November 06-10, 2007, Lisbon, Portugal [doi>10.1145/1321440.1321504]
• 9: Ian Ruthven, Re-examining the potential effectiveness of interactive query expansion, Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, July 28-August 01, 2003, Toronto, Canada [doi>10.1145/860435.860475]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Query formulation

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
game, query expansion