A User Query Expansion Behavior Study: Using MeSH as Term Suggestion Source
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Hung, Cheng-Li
Abstract
It has been argued that traditional information retrieval evaluation is ill-equipped to address the need to validate the efficacy of today’s highly interactive systems, which require users’ active participation to be effective.
To answer the challenge of interactive information retrieval evaluation, a novel methodology was applied to test the effectiveness of MAP (Multiple Access to PubMed), a metadata-guided search interface for PubMed bibliographic search. The most distinctive aspect of our methodology is to use real users searching for real search requests on real system, instead of using assigned tasks common in traditional IR evaluation. To control the impact of individual search requests on search performance, a repeated measure design was adopted where users'' search request served as its own control of variance. Comparisons of information behaviors between MAP and the regular PubMed interface were made.
The purpose of the study is to examine whether interfaces and topic familiarity might interfere user’s search and term selecting behaviors.
Some major findings are as follows. 1. The participants were found to input more diverse terms and make more submissions were made using MAP. There were also differences in term category selection between the two interfaces. 2. Topic familiarity was also shown to influence users'' query expansion behaviors. Differences were found between the categories from which terms were selected between MAP and PubMed. 3. MAP was shown to help users to uncover relevance document ranked much lower in the original dataset. 4. MAP is more effective in search situations where the users were less familiar with the topics.
Subjects
interactive information retrieval
query expansion
user behavior
term suggestion
MeSH
Medical subject heading
PubMed
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