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Starting Conversations with Search Engines - Interfaces that Elicit Natural Language Queries

Published: 14 March 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Search systems on the Web rely on user input to generate relevant results. Since early information retrieval systems, users are trained to issue keyword searches and adapt to the language of the system. Recent research has shown that users often withhold detailed information about their initial information need, although they are able to express it in natural language. We therefore conduct a user study (N = 139) to investigate how four different design variants of search interfaces can encourage the user to reveal more information. Our results show that a chatbot-inspired search interface can increase the number of mentioned product attributes by 84% and promote natural language formulations by 139% in comparison to a standard search bar interface.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)What Did I Say Again? Relating User Needs to Search Outcomes in Conversational CommerceProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202410.1145/3670653.3670680(129-139)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Comparing Traditional and LLM-based Search for Image GeolocationProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638305(291-302)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Large Language Model Augmented Narrative Driven RecommendationsProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3604915.3608829(777-783)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHIIR '21: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
March 2021
384 pages
ISBN:9781450380553
DOI:10.1145/3406522
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 the author(s) 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: 14 March 2021

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  1. e-commerce
  2. information need
  3. query formulation
  4. user-centered design

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Overall Acceptance Rate 55 of 163 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)What Did I Say Again? Relating User Needs to Search Outcomes in Conversational CommerceProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202410.1145/3670653.3670680(129-139)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Comparing Traditional and LLM-based Search for Image GeolocationProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638305(291-302)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Large Language Model Augmented Narrative Driven RecommendationsProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3604915.3608829(777-783)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023

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