Second Workshop on Supporting Complex Search Tasks (original) (raw)

Report on the Second Workshop on Supporting Complex Search Tasks

ACM SIGIR Forum

There is broad consensus in the field of IR that search is complex in many use cases and applications, both on the Web and in domain-specific collections, and both in our professional and in our daily life. Yet our understanding of complex search tasks, in comparison to simple look up tasks, is fragmented at best. The workshop addressed many open research questions: What are the obvious use cases and applications of complex search? What are essential features of work tasks and search tasks to take into account? And how do these evolve over time? With a multitude of information, varying from introductory to specialized, and from authoritative to speculative or opinionated, when should which sources of information be shown? How does the information seeking process evolve and what are relevant differences between different stages? With complex task and search process management, blending searching, browsing, and recommendations, and supporting exploratory search to sensemaking and anal...

Revisiting Exploratory Search from the HCI Perspective

2010

ABSTRACT In this paper, we revisit the definition of Exploratory Search tasks after 4 years of contributions from the Information Seeking and Retrieval community. We consolidate the factors that influence an exploratory search task: objective, search activities, conceptual complexity, and procedural complexity, and introduce a new factor: domain knowledge. We hypothesize that, in order to support Exploratory Search tasks efficiently, we must consider all the factors from an HCI perspective.

Interactive Search Profiles as a Design Tool

2019

Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) research studies how users interact with IR systems and evaluates the users’ satisfaction with the retrieval process. Thus, it focuses on how users behave when they interact with IR systems. The involvement of potential users, and access to dynamic and individual information needs are essential elements in IIR studies. User-oriented evaluations investigate the ability of users to engage with a system, thus requiring real users to be involved in the evaluation process. Despite its importance in driving the design of better and more usable IR systems, the user-oriented evaluation approach has been criticised for: (i) being expensive and time consuming in its application, (ii) failing to capture a holistic understanding of the context, as it focuses on users, (iii) delivering not reusable data, often of qualitative nature, and (iv) generating experiments and results that are not reproducible. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, bas...