Electronic discussion groups provide a convenient forum for individuals to share their experiences of chronic illness. The language use of individual participants, and the way their language shifts over time, may provide implicit indications of important shifts in sense-of-self. This paper relates experience with application of the hyperspace analogue to language (HAL) model for automatic construction of a dimensional model from a corpus of text. HAL is applied to 17 months of discussion on a closed list of 20 women coping with chronic illness. The discussion group was moderated for a focus the phenomenon of "Transition' - how people can learn to incorporate the consequences of illness into their lives. The current phase of research focuses on identification of clusters of words that can represent key aspects of Transition. The HAL models for two participants have been analyzed by experts in Transition to form candidate clusters. These clusters are then used as a basis for contrasting the language usage of an individual participant over time as compared to the entire corpus. We have not yet found a reliable basis for identifying transitions in an individual based on their entries into a discussion forum, although the clusters may have some inherent value for introspection on individual experiences and Transition in general. We report challenges for interpretation of the HAL model related to the correlation of dimensions and the impact of group dynamics.

Abstract This article compares search effectiveness when using query‐based Internet search (via the Google search engine), directory‐based search (via Yahoo), and phrase‐based query reformulation‐assisted search (via the Hyperindex browser) by means of a controlled, user‐based experimental study. The focus was to evaluate aspects of the search process. Cognitive load was measured using a secondary digit‐monitoring task to quantify the effort of the user in various search states; independent relevance judgements were employed to gauge the quality of the documents accessed during the search process and time was monitored as a function of search state. Results indicated directory‐based search does not offer increased relevance over the query‐based search (with or without query formulation assistance), and also takes longer. Query reformulation does significantly improve the relevance of the documents through which the user must trawl, particularly when the formulation of query terms is more difficult. However, the improvement in document relevance comes at the cost of increased search time, although this difference is quite small when the search is self‐terminated. In addition, the advantage of the query reformulation seems to occur as a consequence of providing more discriminating terms rather than by increasing the length of queries.

This article compares search effectiveness when using query-based Internet search (via the Google search engine), directory-based search (via Yahoo) and phrase-based query reformulation assisted search (via the Hyperindex browser) by means of a controlled, user-based experimental study. The focus was to evaluate aspects of the search process. Cognitive load was measured using a secondary digit-monitoring task to quantify the effort of the user in various search states; independent relevance judgements were employed to gauge the quality of the documents accessed during the search process. Time was monitored in various search states. Results indicated the directory-based search does not offer increased relevance over the query-based search (with or without query formulation assistance), and also takes longer. Query reformulation does significantly improve the relevance of the documents through which the user must trawl versus standard query-based internet search. However, the improvement in document relevance comes at the cost of increased search time and increased cognitive load.