Empirical studies of end-user information searching

A. Sutcliffe, M. Ennis, S. Watkinson
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引用次数: 148

Abstract

An empirical investigation of information retrieval (IR) using the MEDLINE1 database was carried out to study user behaviour, performance and to investigate the reasons for suboptimal searches. The experimental subjects were drawn from two groups of final year medical students who differed in their knowledge of the search system (i.e., novice and expert users). The subjects carried out four search tasks and their recall and precision performance was recorded. Data was captured on the search strategies used, duration, and logs of submitted queries. Differences were found between the groups for the performance measure of recall in only one of the four experimental tasks. Overall performance was poor. Analysis of strategies, timing data, and query logs showed that there were many different causes for search failure or success. Poor searchers either gave up too quickly, employed few search terms, used only simple queries, or used the wrong search terms. Good searchers persisted longer, used a larger, richer set of terms, constructed more complex queries, and were more diligent in evaluating the retrieved results. However, individual performances were not correlated with all of these factors. Poor performers frequently exhibited several factors of good searcher behaviour and failed for just one reason. Overall end-user searching behaviour is complex and it seems that just one factor can cause poor performance, whereas good performance can result from suboptimal strategies that compensate for some difficulties. The implications of the results for the design of IR interfaces are discussed.
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终端用户信息搜索的实证研究
利用MEDLINE1数据库对信息检索(IR)进行了实证研究,以研究用户行为、性能并调查次优搜索的原因。实验对象来自两组对搜索系统了解程度不同的大四医学生(即新手和专家用户)。被试进行了四项搜索任务,并记录了他们的查全率和查准率。捕获了关于所使用的搜索策略、持续时间和提交查询的日志的数据。在四个实验任务中,两组之间只有一个任务的记忆力表现有差异。整体表现不佳。对策略、计时数据和查询日志的分析表明,搜索失败或成功有许多不同的原因。糟糕的搜索者要么放弃得太快,要么使用很少的搜索词,要么只使用简单的查询,要么使用了错误的搜索词。优秀的搜索者持续的时间更长,使用更大、更丰富的术语集,构造更复杂的查询,并且在评估检索结果时更勤奋。然而,个人表现与所有这些因素并不相关。表现不佳的人经常表现出良好搜索行为的几个因素,而失败的原因只有一个。整体的终端用户搜索行为是复杂的,似乎只有一个因素会导致性能不佳,而良好的性能可能来自于补偿一些困难的次优策略。讨论了研究结果对红外接口设计的启示。
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3.5 months
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