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Learning by Example: Training Users with High-quality Query Suggestions

Published: 09 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The queries submitted by users to search engines often poorly describe their information needs and represent a potential bottleneck in the system. In this paper we investigate to what extent it is possible to aid users in learning how to formulate better queries by providing examples of high-quality queries interactively during a number of search sessions. By means of several controlled user studies we collect quantitative and qualitative evidence that shows: (1) study participants are able to identify and abstract qualities of queries that make them highly effective, (2) after seeing high-quality example queries participants are able to themselves create queries that are highly effective, and, (3) those queries look similar to expert queries as defined in the literature. We conclude by discussing what the findings mean in the context of the design of interactive search systems.

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    SIGIR '15: Proceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    August 2015
    1198 pages
    ISBN:9781450336215
    DOI:10.1145/2766462
    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: 09 August 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. behavioural change
    2. reflection
    3. search expertise
    4. user study

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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    • (2023)Bootstrapping Query Suggestions in Spotify's Instant Search SystemProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591827(3230-3234)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Characterizing and Early Predicting User Performance for Adaptive Search Path RecommendationProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.79960:1(408-420)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
    • (2022)Search UI with fill-in-the-blank for clarifying purpose of information exploration and its evaluationProceedings of the 5th Workshop on Human Factors in Hypertext10.1145/3538882.3542794(1-8)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2022
    • (2022)Mitigating Position Bias in Review Search Results with Aspect Indicator for Loss AversionHuman Interface and the Management of Information: Applications in Complex Technological Environments10.1007/978-3-031-06509-5_2(17-32)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2022
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    • (2021)A day at the racesApplied Intelligence10.1007/s10489-021-02719-2Online publication date: 17-Aug-2021
    • (2020)Search Support ToolsUnderstanding and Improving Information Search10.1007/978-3-030-38825-6_8(139-160)Online publication date: 30-May-2020
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