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Untangling the Concept of Task in Information Seeking and Retrieval

Published: 31 August 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Many researchers have pointed to tasks as being the driving force for Information Seeking and Retrieval (ISR). Unfortunately, researchers do not agree on what is meant by tasks and related concepts such as activities and search tasks. Researchers often use different terminologies to describe the same concepts or use the same terms to refer to different concepts. Moreover, previous researchers ignored work roles and their effect on tasks. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present some of the main competing task hierarchies by conducting a literature analysis in the field of ISR, management, work structure, and human resources. A specific contribution is to use key existing (explicit or implicit) hierarchies and frameworks of tasks into an integrated taxonomy of tasks and related concepts for use by researchers in ISR.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)GOLF: Goal-Oriented Long-term liFe tasks supported by human-AI collaborationProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657655(3072-3072)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Information shapingJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2487175:4(469-482)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2024
  • (2023)Taking Search to TaskProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3576840.3578288(1-13)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2023

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  1. Untangling the Concept of Task in Information Seeking and Retrieval

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICTIR '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval
    July 2021
    334 pages
    ISBN:9781450386111
    DOI:10.1145/3471158
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    Publication History

    Published: 31 August 2021

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    Author Tags

    1. ISR
    2. activity
    3. information seeking and retrieval
    4. task
    5. work role

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    • European Union?s Horizon 2020 Marie Sk?odowska-Curie

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    View all
    • (2024)GOLF: Goal-Oriented Long-term liFe tasks supported by human-AI collaborationProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657655(3072-3072)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Information shapingJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2487175:4(469-482)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2024
    • (2023)Taking Search to TaskProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3576840.3578288(1-13)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2023

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