Collaborative information‐seeking (CIS) tasks, such as holiday planning, academic research, medical/health information seeking, cannot be tackled without making sense of the task and the encountered information together with collaborators, that is, collaborative sensemaking. In CIS, collaborative sensemaking is an important but understudied aspect. A thorough understanding of collaborative sensemaking behavior in CIS tasks is essential to develop tools to support collaborative sensemaking activities in CIS. In this article, we investigate the general patterns and differences in collaborative sensemaking behavior in travel planning and topic research tasks using the data from 2 observational user studies. The results show the common stages of the collaborative sensemaking process and the differences in users' collaborative sensemaking strategies and activities between the 2 tasks. This comparative study enhances our understanding of the collaborative sensemaking process in CIS tasks and the differences in user's sensemaking behavior according to tasks, and describes implications for supporting collaborative sensemaking behavior in CIS tasks.

Understanding the information‐seeking behavior of visually impaired users is essential to designing search interfaces that support them during their search tasks. In a previous article, we reported the information‐seeking behavior of visually impaired users when performing complex search tasks on the web, and we examined the difficulties encountered when interacting with search interfaces via speech‐based screen readers. In this article, we use our previous findings to inform the design of a search interface to support visually impaired users for complex information seeking. We particularly focus on implementing TrailNote, a tool to support visually impaired searchers in managing the search process, and we also redesign the spelling‐support mechanism using nonspeech sounds to address previously observed difficulties in interacting with this feature. To enhance the user experience, we have designed interface features to be technically accessible as well as usable with speech‐based screen readers. We have evaluated the proposed interface with 12 visually impaired users and studied how they interacted with the interface components. Our findings show that the search interface was effective in supporting participants for complex information seeking and that the proposed interface features were accessible and usable with speech‐based screen readers.

Multi‐session search tasks are complex and span more than one web session. Such tasks are challenging because searchers must keep track of their search progress and the information they encounter across sessions. Multi‐session tasks can be cognitively taxing for visually impaired users because the lack of persistence of screen readers causes the load on working memory to be high. In this article, we first discuss the habitual behavior of visually impaired participants for multi‐session tasks when using popular search interfaces. We then present the evaluation of a search interface developed to support complex information seeking for visually impaired users. The user evaluation was structured in two sessions to simulate a multi‐session task. Thus, we discuss the strategies observed among participants to resume the search, to review previously encountered information, and to satisfy their evolved information need. We also compare the information‐seeking behavior across the two sessions and examine how the proposed interface supports participants for multi‐session tasks. Findings from this evaluation contribute to our understanding of the information‐seeking behavior of visually impaired users and have implications for the design of tools to support searchers to manage and make sense of information during multi‐session search tasks.

Abstract Understanding search behavior is important and leads to more effective interfaces that support searchers throughout the search process. In this article, through an observational user study, we investigate the search behavior of 15 visually impaired and 15 sighted searchers while they complete complex search tasks online. We study complex search tasks because they are challenging, cognitively intensive and affect performance of searchers. We compare the behavior of the two groups of searchers at four stages of the information‐seeking process namely, Query Formulation, Search Results Exploration, Query Reformulation, and Search Results Management. For each stage, we identify research questions to investigate the impact of speech‐based screen readers on the information‐seeking behavior of visually impaired users. Significant differences were observed during query formulation and in the use of query‐level support features such as query suggestions and spelling suggestions. In addition, screen‐reader users submitted a lower number of queries and displayed comparatively limited exploratory behavior during search results exploration. We investigate how a lack of visual cues affected visually impaired searchers' approach towards query reformulation and observed different strategies to manage and use information encountered during the search process. We discuss the implications that our findings have for the design of search interfaces and propose a set of design guidelines to consider when designing interfaces that are usable and accessible with screen readers. This work also enhances our understanding of search behavior when using an auditory interface and could be useful when designing audio‐based information retrieval systems.

The primary aim of XML element retrieval is to return to users XML elements, rather than whole documents. This poster describes a small study, in which we elicited users' expectations, i.e. their anticipated experience, when interacting with an XML retrieval system, as compared to a traditional 'flat' document retrieval system.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether element retrieval (as opposed to full-text retrieval) is meaningful and useful for searchers when carrying out information-seeking tasks. Our results suggest that searchers find the structural breakdown of documents useful when browsing within retrieved documents, and provide support for the usefulness of element retrieval in interactive settings.

Documents formatted in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) are becoming increasingly available in collections of various document types. In this paper, we present an approach for the summarisation of XML documents. The novelty of this approach lies in that it is based on features not only from the content of documents, but also from their logical structure. We follow a machine learning like, sentence extraction-based summarisation technique. To find which features are more effective for producing summaries this approach views sentence extraction as an ordering task. We evaluated our summarisation model using the INEX dataset. The results demonstrate that the inclusion of features from the logical structure of documents increases the effectiveness of the summariser, and that the learnable system is also effective and well-suited to the task of summarisation in the context of XML documents.

Abstract In this article, we investigate the criteria used by online searchers when assessing the relevance of Web pages for information‐seeking tasks. Twenty‐four participants were given three tasks each, and they indicated the features of Web pages that they used when deciding about the usefulness of the pages in relation to the tasks. These tasks were presented within the context of a simulated work‐task situation. We investigated the relative utility of features identified by participants (Web page content, structure, and quality) and how the importance of these features is affected by the type of information‐seeking task performed and the stage of the search. The results of this study provide a set of criteria used by searchers to decide about the utility of Web pages for different types of tasks. Such criteria can have implications for the design of systems that use or recommend Web pages.

We investigate the criteria used by online searchers when assessing the relevance of web pages to information-seeking tasks. Twenty four searchers were given three tasks each, and indicated the features of web pages which they employed when deciding about the usefulness of the pages. These tasks were presented within the context of a simulated work-task situation. The results of this study provide a set of criteria used by searchers to decide about the utility of web pages. Such criteria have implications for the design of systems that use or recommend web pages, as well as to authors of web pages.

Abstract. The application of document clustering to information retrieval has been motivated by the potential effectiveness gains postulated by the Cluster Hypothesis. The hypothesis states that relevant documents tend to be highly similar to each other, and therefore tend to appear in the same clusters. In this paper we propose that, for any given query, pairs of relevant documents will exhibit an inherent similarity which is dictated by the query itself. Our research describes an attempt to devise means by which this similarity can be detected. We propose the use of query-sensitive similarity measures that bias interdocument relationships towards pairs of documents that jointly possess attributes that are expressed in a query. We experimentally tested query-sensitive measures against conventional ones that do not take the context of the query into account. We calculated interdocument relationships for varying numbers of top-ranked documents for five document collections. Our results show a consistent and significant increase in the number of relevant documents that become nearest neighbours of any given relevant document when query-sensitive measures are used. These results suggest that the effectiveness of a cluster-based IR system has the potential to increase through the use of query-sensitive similarity measures. 1.

We present the results of a study of user's perception of relevance of documents. The aim is to study experimentally how users' perception varies depending on the form that retrieved documents are presented. Documents retrieved in response to a query are presented to users in a variety of ways, from full text to a machine spoken query-biased automatically-generated summary, and the difference in users' perception of relevance is studied. The experimental results suggest that the effectiveness of advanced multimedia Information Retrieval applications may be affected by the low level of users' perception of relevance of retrieved documents.

This paper presents an investigation into the utility of document summarisation in the context of information retrieval, more specifically in the application of so called query biased (or user directed)summaries: summaries customised to reflect the information need expressed in a query.Employed in the retrieved document list displayed after a retrieval took place, the summaries' utility was evaluated in a task-based environment by measuring users' speed and accuracy in identifying relevant documents.This was compared to the performance achieved when users were presented with the more typical output of an IR system: a static predefined summary composed of the title and first few sentences of retrieved documents.The results from the evaluation indicate that the use of query biased summaries significantly improves both the accuracy and speed of user relevance judgements.