Search

This experience paper shines more light on a simulated work taskapproach to studying information seeking stages. This explicit multistage approach was first utilized in Huurdeman, Wilson, and Kamps (2016) to investigate the utility of search user interface (SUI) features at different macro-level stages of complex tasks. We focus on the paper’s terminology, research design, methodology and use of previous resources. Finally, based on our experience, we reflect on the potential for re-using our multistage approach and on general barriers to re-use in an Interactive Information Retrieval research context.

In this work we describe a system to evaluate multiple point- of-interest recommendation systems. In this system each recommendation service will be exposed online and crowd-sourced assessors will interact with merged results from multiple services, which are responding to suggestion requests live, in order to determine which system performs best. This work builds upon work done previously as part of the TREC Contextual Suggestion Track and describes plans for how the track will be run in 2015.

Users looking for books online are confronted with both professional meta-data and user-generated content. The goal of the Interactive Social Book Search Track was to investigate how users used these two sources of information, when looking for books in a leisure context. To this end participants recruited by four teams performed two different tasks using one of two book-search interfaces. Additionally one of the two interfaces also investigated whether user performance can be improved by providing a user-interface that supports multiple search stages.

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 professionally 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 the 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 to show what sources of information? 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 analytics, UI and UX design pose an over-constrained challenge. How do we know that our approach is any good? Supporting complex search task requires new collaborations across the whole field of IR, and the proposed workshop will bring together a diverse group of researchers to work together on one of the greatest challenges of our field.