Supporting Exploratory Search Through Interaction Modeling

With the explosive growth of information available in the Web, locating needed and relevant information remains a difficult task, whether the information is textual or visual. Although information retrieval techniques have improved a lot in providing relevant information, exploratory information search still remains difficult due to its inherently open-ended and dynamic nature. Modeling the user behavior and predicting dynamically changing information needs in exploratory search is hard. Over the past decade there has been increasing attention on rich user interfaces, retrieval techniques, and studies of exploratory search. However, existing work does not yet support the dynamic aspects of exploratory search. The objective of this research is to understand how user interaction modeling can be applied to provide better support in exploratory search tasks. In this research, we focus on building user models that can predict user intent in search using only implicit interactions with search results. One outcome of this research is a personalized search tool that predicts user intent with implicit interactions and dynamically adjusts search results.