Information Retrieval Through Man‐machine Dialogue

Oddy, Robert N

doi:10.1108/eb026631

Cited by 177 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Users are very unlikely to be able to specify their information needs adequately, especially given only one chance. With increases in computer speed, interactive or iterative searches are common, and users can reformulate queries in light of the system's response to previous queries (see, e.g., Oddy, 1977;Williams, 1984). There is surprisingly little experimental evidence to assess the success of users' successive attempts at query formulation.…”

Section: O~f-------'i'----'i'----'i'----'i--"--'i--"'i--"'i--'--mentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving the retrieval of information from external sources

Dumais

1991

Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers

414

277

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A major barrier to successful retrieval from external sources (e.g., electronic databases) is the tremendous variability in the words that people use to describe objects of interest. The fact that different authors use different words to describe essentially the same idea means that relevant objects will be missed; conversely, the fact that the same word can be used to refer to many different things means that irrelevant objects will be retrieved. We describe a statistical method called latent semantic indexing, which models the implicit higher order structure in the association of words and objects and improves retrieval performance by up to 30%. Additional large performance improvements of 40% and 67% can be achieved through the use of differential term weighting and iterative retrieval methods.Although much research in cognitive psychology has been devoted to the question of how people retrieve information from their own memories, much less work has been done on the issue of the retrieval of information from external sources such as other people, books, libraries, or electronic databases. One problem that is immediately evident in attempting to retrieve information from external sources is the mismatch between the searcher's language and that of the target information. How often have you looked in the index of a book or the library catalog and been unable to find what you wanted? This problem is not evident in traditional memory modeling, because memory probes are in the same language as the memory representation.Most approaches to the retrieval of electronically available textual materials depend on a lexical match between words in users' requests and those in database objects. Typically only text objects that contain one or more words in common with those in the users' query are returned as relevant. Word-based retrieval systems like this are, however, far from ideal-many objects relevant to a users' query are missed, and many unrelated or irrelevant materials are retrieved. A particularly salient example of the failure to find relevant materials is reported by Blair and Maron (1985) in a study of a state-of-the-art on-line legal retrieval system. Two lawyers, with the aid of an expert search intermediary, searched the database for all materials relevant to a case they were litigating. The system contained the full text of 40,000 documents, corresponding to roughly 350,000 pages of text. The lawyers were asked to search until they thought they had found 75% of the relevant materials. The surprising result was that they found only 20% of the known relevant materials.Correspondence should be addressed to Susan T. Dumais, Bellcore, 445 South St., Room 2L-371, Morristown, NJ 07962-1910. 229We believe that fundamental characteristics of human verbal behavior underlie these retrieval difficulties. Furnas, Landauer, Gomez, and Dumais (1987), for example, have shown that people generate the same main keyword to describe well-known objects less than 20% of the time. Comparably poor agreement has been reported in stu...

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Section: O~f-------'i'----'i'----'i'----'i--"--'i--"'i--"'i--'--mentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving the retrieval of information from external sources

Dumais

1991

Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers

414

277

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“…Contemporary search engines like Google did not anchor my thinking about what was possible. My thinking was anchored by what were, at the time, radical ways to conceptualize information searchers (from Belkin [11]), the information search process (from Oddy [12]) and user interfaces (from Hearst [13]). The perspective I gained by watching this area grow and change has been invaluable.…”

Section: Special Sectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An introduction to the joint principles for data citation

Altman¹,

Borgman

Crosas

et al. 2015

Bull of the Asso Info Sci

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EDITOR'S SUMMARY While the conventions of bibliographic citation have been long established, the sole focus is on reference to other scholarly works. Access to the data serving as the basis for scholarly work has been limited. Data citation extends important access to material that has been largely unavailable for sharing, verification and reuse. The Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, finalized in February 2014, is a formal statement pulling together practices used in the research and publishing arenas and in common use. The declaration encompasses eight principles that stress the importance and legitimacy of data, the need to give scholarly credit to contributors and the importance of data as evidence. Cited data should have unique and persistent identifiers, and the citation should facilitate human and machine access and support verification and interoperability. The principles are expected to have broad impact on research, recognition and scholarly publishing.

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“…support different ISSs, such as browsing or specified searching (Oddy, 1977;Bates, 1990). These different kinds of ISSs can be optimally supported by different combinations of IR support techniques (Belkin, 1996).…”

Section: Lastly To Build An Ir System Which Can Support All Isss Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting multiple information-seeking strategies in a single system framework

Yuan

Belkin

2007

Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

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This study explores issues in information retrieval (IR) systems with special attention to information-seeking strategies (ISSs), the relation of ISSs to IR system design, and how to support multiple ISSs within a single system framework. It addresses the observation that people engage in a variety of ISSs within a single information-seeking episode. This study proposes to construct and evaluate an interactive IR (IIR) system which incorporates different IR support techniques to adaptively support multiple ISSs. Based on an information-seeking episode model (Belkin, 1996), and a multi-faceted classification scheme of information behaviors , it was conducted in a series of three consecutive steps. Firstly, four experimental systems were designed and implemented with each tailored to one of the following IR support techniques: database summary, clustered retrieval results, table of contents navigation, and fielded query. A within-subjects experiment was conducted to compare each experimental system to its respective generic baseline system, which was constructed by following the iii current standard model with a specific query input and a ranked list of search results.Results indicated that the experimental systems were superior to the baseline systems.Secondly, information-seeking dialogue structures developed in the MERIT system (Belkin, Cool, Stein & Thiel, 1995) were adopted to guide the design of the IIR system. The dialogue structures were built based on the Conversational Roles (COR) model (Sitter & Stein, 1992). Finally, an experimental system which supported multiple ISSs was built by incorporating the four IR support techniques and the dialogue structures.This experimental system was tested in a within-subjects experiment in comparison to a generic baseline system. The experiment, with 32 subjects each searching on eight different topics, indicated that using the experimental system resulted in significantly better performance, significantly more effective interaction, and significantly better usability than the baseline system. These results demonstrated that it is possible to support quite different information-seeking behaviors within a single system framework which searchers can understand and use effectively. A principled approach to designing such systems needs to be further investigated.

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Information Retrieval Through Man‐machine Dialogue

Cited by 177 publications

References 15 publications

Improving the retrieval of information from external sources

Improving the retrieval of information from external sources

An introduction to the joint principles for data citation

Supporting multiple information-seeking strategies in a single system framework

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