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A Study on User-Controllable Social Exploratory Search

Published: 05 March 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Information-seeking tasks with learning or investigative purposes are usually referred to as exploratory search. Exploratory search unfolds as a dynamic process where the user, amidst navigation, trial-and-error and on-the-fly selections, gathers and organizes information (resources). A range of innovative interfaces with increased user control have been developed to support exploratory search process. In this work we present our attempt to increase the power of exploratory search interfaces by using ideas of social search, i.e., leveraging information left by past users of information systems. Social search technologies are highly popular nowadays, especially for improving ranking. However, current approaches to social ranking do not allow users to decide to what extent social information should be taken into account for result ranking. This paper presents an interface that integrates social search functionality into an exploratory search system in a user-controlled way that is consistent with the nature of exploratory search. The interface incorporates control features that allow the user to (i) express information needs by selecting keywords and (ii) to express preferences for incorporating social wisdom based on tag matching and user similarity. The interface promotes search transparency through color-coded stacked bars and rich tooltips. In an online study investigating system accuracy and subjective aspects with a structural model we found that, when users actively interacted with all its control features, the hybrid system outperformed a baseline content-based-only tool and users were more satisfied.

Reference

[1]
J-w. Ahn and P. Brusilovsky. 2013. Adaptive visualization for exploratory information retrieval. Inf. Process. Manag. 49, 5 (2013), 1139--1164.

Cited By

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  • (2024)Unexplored Frontiers: A Review of Empirical Studies of Exploratory SearchACM SIGIR Forum10.1145/3687273.368727858:1(1-19)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Visual Keyword/Result Linking: Using Interaction to Dynamically Reveal RelationshipsProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638307(66-76)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
  • (2022)User Control in Adaptive Information AccessProceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3503252.3533722(357-360)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
IUI '18: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
March 2018
698 pages
ISBN:9781450349451
DOI:10.1145/3172944
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 March 2018

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Author Tags

  1. exploratory search
  2. hybrid ranking
  3. information filtering
  4. preference elicitation
  5. social search

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • Horizon 2020 MOVING Project
  • Austrian COMET Program
  • Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation

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IUI'18
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Acceptance Rates

IUI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 43 of 299 submissions, 14%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 746 of 2,811 submissions, 27%

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IUI '25

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Unexplored Frontiers: A Review of Empirical Studies of Exploratory SearchACM SIGIR Forum10.1145/3687273.368727858:1(1-19)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Visual Keyword/Result Linking: Using Interaction to Dynamically Reveal RelationshipsProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638307(66-76)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
  • (2022)User Control in Adaptive Information AccessProceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3503252.3533722(357-360)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2022
  • (2022)A Study of Cross-Session Cross-Device Search Within an Academic Digital LibraryProceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3531929(384-394)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
  • (2022)HiveRel: hexagons visualization for relationship-based knowledge acquisitionCCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction10.1007/s42486-022-00097-34:4(408-436)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Interactive visual facets to support fluid exploratory searchJournal of Visualization10.1007/s12650-022-00865-426:1(211-230)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2022
  • (2022)A study of visually linked keywords to support exploratory browsing in academic searchJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2462373:8(1171-1191)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2022
  • (2021)CourseQ: the impact of visual and interactive course recommendation in university environmentsResearch and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning10.1186/s41039-021-00167-716:1Online publication date: 30-Jun-2021
  • (2021)Interactive Visual Facets to Support Fluid Exploratory SearchProceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction10.1145/3481549.3481565(1-10)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2021
  • (2021)Exploring and Promoting Diagnostic Transparency and Explainability in Online Symptom CheckersProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445101(1-17)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
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