Article

Query length in interactive information retrieval

Authors:

G. Kim,

C. CoolAuthors Info & Claims

SIGIR '03: Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval

Pages 205 - 212

https://doi.org/10.1145/860435.860474

Published: 28 July 2003 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

Query length in best-match information retrieval (IR) systems is well known to be positively related to effectiveness in the IR task, when measured in experimental, non-interactive environments. However, in operational, interactive IR systems, query length is quite typically very short, on the order of two to three words. We report on a study which tested the effectiveness of a particular query elicitation technique in increasing initial searcher query length, and which tested the effectiveness of queries elicited using this technique, and the relationship in general between query length and search effectiveness in interactive IR. Results show that the specific technique results in longer queries than a standard query elicitation technique, that this technique is indeed usable, that the technique results in increased user satisfaction with the search, and that query length is positively correlated with user satisfaction with the search.

References

[1]

Belkin, N.J., Cool, C., Jeng, J., Keller, A., Kelly, D. Kim, J., Lee, H.-J., Tang, M.-C., Yuan, X.-J. (2002) Rutgers' TREC 2001 Interactive Track Experience. In E.M. Voorhees & D.M. Harman (Eds.) The tenth text retrieval conference, TREC 2001 (pp.465--472). Washington, D.C.: GPO.

Google Scholar

[2]

Belkin, N.J., Cool, C., Kelly, D., Kim, G., Kim, J.-Y., Lee, H.-J., Muresan, G., Tang, M.-C., & Yuan, X.-J. (2003). Rutgers Interactive Track at TREC 2002. In E.M. Voorhees & D. M. Harman (Eds.). The 2002 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2002) (in press). Washington, D.C.: GPO.

Google Scholar

[3]

Belkin, N.J., Oddy, R.N. & Brooks, H.M. (1982) ASK for information retrieval. Part 2. Journal of Documentation, 38(3), 145--164

Crossref

Google Scholar

[4]

Byström, K. & Jäärvelin, K. (1995). Task complexity affects information seeking and use. Information Processing & Management, 31(2), 191--213

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

Craswell, N. & Hawking, D. (2003) Overview of the TREC 2002 Web track. In In E.M. Voorhees & D. M. Harman (Eds.). The 2002 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2002) (in press). Washington, D.C.: GPO.

Google Scholar

[6]

Hersh, W. & Over, P. (2003) TREC 2002 interactive track report. In: E.M. Voorhees & D.K. Harman (Eds.) The 2002 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2002) (in press). Washington, D.C.: GPO.

Google Scholar

[7]

Jansen, B.J., Spink, A. & Saracevic, T. (2000). Real life, real users and real needs: A study and analysis of users' queries on the Web. Information Processing and Management, 36(2), 207--227.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Karlgren, J. & Franzéén, K. (1997) Verbosity and interface design. Retrieved on 17 January 2002 at: http://www.ling.su.se/staff/franzen/irinterface.html

Google Scholar

[9]

Kelly, D. & Cool, C. (2002) The effects of topic familiarity on information search behavior. In: G. Marchionini & W. Hersh (Eds.) JCDL 2002. Proceedings of the Second ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (74--75). New York: ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

Milic-Frayling, N., Zhai, C., Tong, X., Jansen, P. & Evans, A (1998). Experiments in query optimization, the CLARIT system TREC-6 report. In: Voorhees, E.M. & Harman, D.K (Eds.) The Sixth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-6) (pp. 415--454). Washington, D.C.: GPO.

Google Scholar

[11]

Walker, S., Robertson, S.E., Boughanem, M., Jones, G.J.F., Sparck Jones, K. (1998) Okapi at TREC-6 Automatic ad hoc, VLC, routing, filtering and QSDR In: Voorhees, E.M. & Harman, D.K (Eds.) The Sixth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-6) (pp 125--136). Washington, D.C.: GPO.

Google Scholar

[12]

Xu, J. & Croft, W.B. (1996) Query expansion using local and global document analysis. In: H.P. Frei, D. Harman, P. Schääuble & R. Wilkinson (Eds.). SIGIR '96. Proceedings of the 19th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (4--11). New York: ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Roegiest ATrippas J(2024)UnExplored FrontCHIIRs: A Workshop Exploring Future Directions for Information AccessProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638302(436-437)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638302
Oliveira BTeixeira Lopes C(2023)The Evolution of Web Search User Interfaces - An Archaeological Analysis of Google Search Engine Result PagesProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3576840.3578320(55-68)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576840.3578320
P AP SS AT.E R(2023)E-Commerce Recommender System based on Customer Reviews Analysis using Deep Neural Network2023 2nd International Conference on Edge Computing and Applications (ICECAA)10.1109/ICECAA58104.2023.10212427(827-831)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECAA58104.2023.10212427
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Query length in interactive information retrieval
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Information retrieval query processing

Recommendations

A Study of Query Length Heuristics in Information Retrieval
CIKM '15: Proceedings of the 24th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

Query length has generally been regarded as a query-specific constant that does not affect document ranking. In this paper, we reveal that query length actually interacts with term frequency (TF) normalization, a key component of all effective retrieval ...
Iterative exploration, design and evaluation of support for query reformulation in interactive information retrieval
Special issue on interactivity at the text retrieval conference (TREC)
Human question answering performance using an interactive document retrieval system
IIIX '12: Proceedings of the 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium

Every day, people answer their questions by using document retrieval systems. Compared to document retrieval systems, question answering (QA) systems aim to speed the rate at which users find answers by retrieving answers rather than documents. To ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

SIGIR '03: Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval

July 2003

490 pages

ISBN:1581136463

DOI:10.1145/860435

General Chairs:
Charles Clarke
University of Waterloo, Canada
,
Gordon Cormack
University of Waterloo, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Jamie Callan
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
,
David Hawking
Australian National University, Australia
,
Alan Smeaton
Dublin City University, Ireland

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]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 July 2003

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

SIGIR03

Sponsor:

SIGIR

SIGIR03: The 26th ACM/SIGIR International Symposium on Information Retrieval

July 28 - August 1, 2003

Toronto, Canada

Acceptance Rates

SIGIR '03 Paper Acceptance Rate 46 of 266 submissions, 17%;

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

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

90
Total Citations
View Citations
1,767
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)29
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 04 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Roegiest ATrippas J(2024)UnExplored FrontCHIIRs: A Workshop Exploring Future Directions for Information AccessProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638302(436-437)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638302
Oliveira BTeixeira Lopes C(2023)The Evolution of Web Search User Interfaces - An Archaeological Analysis of Google Search Engine Result PagesProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3576840.3578320(55-68)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576840.3578320
P AP SS AT.E R(2023)E-Commerce Recommender System based on Customer Reviews Analysis using Deep Neural Network2023 2nd International Conference on Edge Computing and Applications (ICECAA)10.1109/ICECAA58104.2023.10212427(827-831)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECAA58104.2023.10212427
Kotake JKitayama DAtzenbeck CRubart J(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
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3538882.3542794
Mondal SRehena Z(2022)Challenges and Limitations of Social Data Analysis ApproachesInternet of Things Based Smart Healthcare10.1007/978-981-19-1408-9_14(307-323)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1408-9_14
Aliannejadi MAzzopardi LZamani HKanoulas EThomas PCraswell NDemartini GZuccon GCulpepper JHuang ZTong H(2021)Analysing Mixed Initiatives and Search Strategies during Conversational SearchProceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management10.1145/3459637.3482231(16-26)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3459637.3482231
Papenmeier AKern DHienert DSliwa AAker AFuhr NScholer FThomas PElsweiler DJoho HKando NSmith C(2021)Starting Conversations with Search Engines - Interfaces that Elicit Natural Language QueriesProceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3406522.3446035(261-265)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3406522.3446035
Wang CYuan XRen X(2020)Twelve Agendas on Interacting with Information: A Human-Engaged Computing PerspectiveData and Information Management10.2478/dim-2020-00154:3(191-199)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.2478/dim-2020-0015
Yuan XSa N(2020)Speak to Me: Interacting with a Spoken Language InterfaceDesign, User Experience, and Usability. Design for Contemporary Interactive Environments10.1007/978-3-030-49760-6_13(194-211)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49760-6_13
Niu XFan XFang YZhang YAllan JBalog KCarterette BGuo J(2019)Deep Learning of Human Information Foraging Behavior with a Search EngineProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval10.1145/3341981.3344231(185-192)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341981.3344231
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

A Study of Query Length Heuristics in Information Retrieval

Iterative exploration, design and evaluation of support for query reformulation in interactive information retrieval

Human question answering performance using an interactive document retrieval system