Search

This article focuses on research and development opportunities to improve current Internet search interfaces so users can succeed more often in situations when they lack the knowledge or contextual awareness to formulate queries or navigate complex information spaces, the search task requires browsing and exploration, or system indexing of available information is inadequate. Most people rely on tentative queries, exploring and retrieving information, and selectively seeking and passively obtaining cues about what step to take next. Researchers are working on techniques to support these kinds of queries in what is known as "exploratory search."

This report describes the 2010 workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval. Now in its fourth year, the event was held in August 2010 in conjunction with the Information Interaction in Context Symposium. The workshop brought together researchers from academia, industry, and government and a range of disciplines to present and discuss their research. We had a record 70 attendees, making this the largest of our workshops to date. New for this year, we ran a challenge, and six research groups participated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report describes HCIR 2009, the third international workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR), held in October 2009 at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. The workshop attracted over 50 participants from across the world and was the largest HCIR workshop to date. The event brought together representatives from academia, industry, and government to discuss research, present work in process, and advance ideas in the area of HCIR. The workshop consisted of a keynote presentation, panel presentations, a poster session, and two guided discussion sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development and testing of systems to support users engaged in exploratory search activities (i.e., searches where the target may be undefined) is an challenge for the online search community. In this article we report on a workshop on exploratory search issues organized in conjunction with the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory's Annual Symposium and Open House in June 2005. This workshop brought together researchers from the fields of Information Seeking (IS), Information Retrieval (IR), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Visualization (IV) for a cross-disciplinary exploration of these and other issues. Although originally intended to focus on interfaces to support exploratory search the workshop blossomed into a rich discussion of not only interface issues, but also evaluation, the cognitive processes that underlie information exploration and research methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the 2011 Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval which was held in Mountain View, California in October 2011. This event serves as a venue for in-depth discussion of models, tools and evaluation methods involving human factors and search. It also features the HCIR Challenge where the participants built systems used in addressing the information availability problem with the use of CiteSeer data.