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Exploiting knowledge-in-the-head and knowledge-in-the-social-web: effects of domain expertise on exploratory search in individual and social search environments

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Our study compared how experts and novices performed exploratory search using a traditional search engine and a social tagging system. As expected, results showed that social tagging systems could facilitate exploratory search for both experts and novices. We, however, also found that experts were better at interpreting the social tags and generating search keywords, which made them better at finding information in both interfaces. Specifically, experts found more general information than novices by better interpretation of social tags in the tagging system; and experts also found more domain-specific information by generating more of their own keywords. We found a dynamic interaction between knowledge-in-the-head and knowledge-in-the-social-web that although information seekers are more and more reliant on information from the social Web, domain expertise is still important in guiding them to find and evaluate the information. Implications on the design of social search systems that facilitate exploratory search are also discussed.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
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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Published: 10 April 2010

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  1. domain expertise
  2. exploratory search
  3. search behavior

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  • (2020)Personalization in text information retrievalJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2423471:3(349-369)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2020
  • (2019)The role of domain knowledge in document selection from search resultsJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2419970:11(1236-1247)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2019
  • (2016)A Research Plan to Study Impact of a Collaborative Web Search Tool on Novice's Query Behavior2016 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS)10.1109/CTS.2016.0100(539-544)Online publication date: Oct-2016
  • (2015)Quality based dynamic incentive taggingDistributed and Parallel Databases10.1007/s10619-014-7164-833:1(69-93)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2015
  • (2015)Predicting users' domain knowledge in information retrieval using multiple regression analysis of search behaviorsJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2321866:5(980-1000)Online publication date: 1-May-2015
  • (2014)Exploratory search with semantic transformations using collaborative knowledge basesProceedings of the 7th ACM international conference on Web search and data mining10.1145/2556195.2556205(661-666)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2014
  • (2014)A Tag-Based Approach for Learning Ergonomic ConceptsHuman Factors in Ergonomics & Manufacturing10.1002/hfm.2055224:5(574-584)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2014
  • (2013)Exploratory Search on Twitter Utilizing User Feedback and Multi-Perspective Microblog AnalysisPLoS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.00788578:11(e78857)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2013
  • (2013)Exploring exploratory searchProceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Intelligent Exploration of Semantic Data10.1145/2462197.2462199(1-8)Online publication date: 1-May-2013
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