Mining user context based on interactive computing for personalized Web search

Relevance is the central concept of information retrieval. Although its important role is unanimously accepted among researchers, numerous different definitions of the term have emerged over the years. Considerable effort has been put into creating consistent and universally applicable descriptions of relevance in the form of relevance frameworks. Across these various formal systems of relevance, a wide range of relevance criteria has been identified. The probably most frequently used single criterion, that in some applications even becomes a synonym for relevance, is topicality. It expresses a document's topical overlap with the user's information need. For textual resources, it is often estimated based on term co-occurrences between query and document. There is, however, a significant number of further noteworthy relevance criteria. Prominent specimen are: (Currency) determines how recent and up to date the document is. Outdated information may have become invalid over time.(Availability) expresses how easy it is to obtain the document. Users might not want to invest more than a threshold amount of resources (e.g., disk space, downloading time or money) to get the document.(Readability) describes the document's readability and understandability. A document with a high topical relevance towards a given information need can become irrelevant if the user is not able to extract the desired information from it.(Credibility) contains criteria such as the document author's expertise, the publication's reputation and the document's general trustworthiness.(Novelty) describes the document's contribution to satisfying an information need with respect to the user's context. E.g., previous search results or general knowledge about the domain.It is evident that these criteria can have very different scopes. Some of them are static characteristics of the document or the author, others depend on the concrete information need at hand or even the user's search context. Currently, state-of-the-art retrieval models often treat relevance (regardless which interpretation of the term was chosen) as an atomic concept that can be expressed through topical overlap between document and query or a plain linear combination of multiple scores. Considering the broad audiences a web search engine has to serve, such a method does not seem optimal as the concrete composition of relevance will vary from person to person depending on social and educational context. Furthermore, each individual can be expected to have situational preference for certain combinations of relevance facets depending on the information need at hand. We investigate combination schemes which respect the dimension-specific relevance distributions. In particular, we developed a risk-aware method of combining relevance criteria inspired by the economic Portfolio theory. As a first stage, we applied this method for result set diversification across dimensions.

This research is motivated by the lack of empirical studies that discuss the existence of libraries as a fulfillment of information needs, especially in the secretariat library of the West Sumatra provincial DPRD. The purpose of this study is to describe the extent of the relationship between the Existence of Libraries and the Information Needs of Users. This type of research is quantitative with a descriptive method. The population in this study were all registered users at the Secretariat Library of the West Sumatra Provincial DPRD. Samples were taken using simple random sampling, and data were collected through observation, interviews, and questionnaires. The results of the analysis showed that the existence of the library was in the good category with an average score of 3.01. The information needs of users were in the good category with an average score of 2.93. Based on the Pearson correlation test, it showed a positive relationship between the existence of the library and the information needs of users of 0.643, including in the interval scale of 0.60-0.799. This shows that the existence of the library has a significant relationship with the information needs of users. These results emphasize that the existence of libraries has a direct influence on the information needs of users, especially institutional libraries where users are members of the institution who have jobs in certain categories.

In this paper, we introduce “task trail” to understand user search behaviors. We define a task to be an atomic user information need, whereas a task trail represents all user activities within that particular task, such as query reformulations, URL clicks. Previously, web search logs have been studied mainly at session or query level where users may submit several queries within one task and handle several tasks within one session. Although previous studies have addressed the problem of task identification, little is known about the advantage of using task over session or query for search applications. In this paper, we conduct extensive analyses and comparisons to evaluate the effectiveness of task trails in several search applications: determining user satisfaction, predicting user search interests, and suggesting related queries. Experiments on large scale data sets of a commercial search engine show that: (1) Task trail performs better than session and query trails in determining user satisfaction; (2) Task trail increases webpage utilities of end users comparing to session and query trails; (3) Task trails are comparable to query trails but more sensitive than session trails in measuring different ranking functions; (4) Query terms from the same task are more topically consistent to each other than query terms from different tasks; (5) Query suggestion based on task trail is a good complement of query suggestions based on session trail and click-through bipartite. The findings in this paper verify the need of extracting task trails from web search logs and enhance applications in search and recommendation systems.

This chapter aims to master web mining and Information Retrieval (IR) in the digital age, thus describing the overviews of web mining and web usage mining; the significance of web mining in the digital age; the overview of IR; the concept of Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR); the evaluation of IR systems; and the significance of IR in the digital age. Web mining can contribute to the increase in profits by selling more products and by minimizing costs. Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover the interesting patterns from web data in order to better serve the needs of web-based multifaceted applications. Mining web data can improve the personalization, create the selling opportunities, and lead to more profitable relationships with customers in global business. Web mining techniques can be applied with the effective analysis of the clearly understood business needs and requirements. Web mining builds the detailed customer profiles based on the transactional data. Web mining is used to create the personalized search engines which can recognize the individuals' search queries by analyzing and profiling the web user's search behavior. IR is the process of obtaining relevant information from a collection of informational resources. IR has considerably changed with the expansion of the Internet and the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and mass storage devices. The effective IR system, including an active indexing system, not only decreases the chances that information will be misfiled but also expedites the retrieval of information. Regarding IR utilization, the resulting time-saving benefit increases office efficiency and productivity while decreasing stress and anxiety. Most IR systems provide the advanced searching capabilities that allow users to create the sophisticated queries. The chapter argues that applying web mining and IR has the potential to enhance organizational performance and reach strategic goals in the digital age.

Given the distinct preferences of different users while using search engines, search personalization has become an important problem in information retrieval. Most approaches to search personalization are based on identifying topics a user may be interested in and personalizing search results based on this information.While topical interests information of users can be highly valuable in personalizing search results and improving user experience, it ignores the fact that two different users that have similar topical interests may still be interested in achieving very different tasks with respect to this topic (e.g. the type of tasks a broker is likely to perform related to finance is likely to be very different than that of a regular investor). Hence, considering user's topical interests jointly with the type of tasks they are likely to be interested in could result in better personalisedWe present an approach that uses search task information embedded in search logs to represent users by their actions over a task-space as well as over their topical-interest space. In particular, we describe a tensor based approach that represents each user in terms of (i) user's topical interests and (ii) user's search task behaviours in a coupled fashion and use these representations for personalization. Additionally, we also integrate user's historic search behavior in a coupled matrix-tensor factorization framework to learn user representations. Through extensive evaluation via query recommendations and user cohort analysis, we demonstrate the value of considering topic specific task information while developing user models.

The goal of this study was to investigate and compare user search activities of 2 discovery tools at an academic library. The implementation of a new discovery tool (Primo by Ex Libris) to replace an existing system (VuFind) provided a unique opportunity to collect transaction logs of both systems and examine user search behavior in an empirical test. Results from a transaction log analysis and a user study of this study have contributed to the understanding of users’ search behavior and their preferences and perceptions of the two systems. We find both commonalities and differences between VuFind and Primo for users’ interactions. The combination use of the transaction log analysis and user study could be applied to other similar search systems assessments.

Search systems use context to effectively satisfy a user's information need as expressed by a query. Tasks are important factors in determining user context during search and many studies have been conducted that identify tasks and task stages through users' interaction behavior with search systems. The type of interaction available to users, however, depends on the type of search interface features available. Queries are the most pervasive input from users to express their information need regardless of the input method, e.g., typing keywords or clicking facets. Instead of characterizing interaction behavior in terms of interface specific components, we propose to characterize users' search behavior in terms of two types of query modification: (i) direct modification, which refers to reformulations of queries; and (ii) indirect modification, which refers to user operations on additional input components provided by various search interfaces. We investigate the utility of characterizing task stages through direct and indirect query reformulations in a case study and find that it is possible to effectively differentiate subsequent stages of the search task. We found that describing user interaction behavior in such a generic form allowed us to relate user actions to search task stages independent from the specific search interface deployed. The next step will then be to validate this idea in a setting with a wider palette of search tasks and tools.

When generating query recommendations for a user, a natural approach is to try and leverage not only the user's most recently submitted query, or reference query, but also information about the current search context, such as the user's recent search interactions. We focus on two important classes of queries that make up search contexts: those that address the same information need as the reference query (on-task queries), and those that do not (off-task queries). We analyze the effects on query recommendation performance of using contexts consisting of only on-task queries, only off-task queries, and a mix of the two. Using TREC Session Track data for simulations, we demonstrate that on-task context is helpful on average but can be easily overwhelmed when off-task queries are interleaved---a common situation according to several analyses of commercial search logs. To minimize the impact of off-task queries on recommendation performance, we consider automatic methods of identifying such queries using a state of the art search task identification technique. Our experimental results show that automatic search task identification can eliminate the effect of off-task queries in a mixed context. We also introduce a novel generalized model for generating recommendations over a search context. While we only consider query text in this study, the model can handle integration over arbitrary user search behavior, such as page visits, dwell times, and query abandonment. In addition, it can be used for other types of recommendation, including personalized web search.

User studies in information science have recognised relevance as a multidimensional construct. An implication of multidimensional relevance is that a user's information need should be modeled by multiple data structures to represent different relevance dimensions. While the extant literature has attempted to model multiple dimensions of a user's information need, the fundamental assumption that a multidimensional model is better than a uni-dimensional model has not been addressed. This study seeks to test this assumption. Our results indicate that a retrieval system that models both topicality and the novelty dimension of a users' information need outperforms a system with a uni-dimensional model.

A set of words is often insufficient to express a user's information need. In order to account for various information needs associated with a query, diversification seems to be a reasonable strategy. By diversifying the result set, we increase the probability of results being relevant to the user's information needs when the given query is ambiguous. A diverse result set must contain a set of documents that cover various subtopics for a given query. We propose a graph based method which exploits the link structure of the web to return a ranked list that provides complete coverage for a query. Our method not only provides diversity to the results set, but also avoids excessive redundancy. Moreover, the probability of relevance of a document is conditioned on the documents that appear before it in the result list. We show the effectiveness of our method by comparing it with a query-likelihood model as the baseline.

Social scientists are producing an ever-expanding volume of data, leading to questions about appraisal and selection of content given finite resources to process data for reuse. We analyze users’ search activity in an established social science data repository to better understand demand for data and more effectively guide collection development. By applying a data-driven approach, we aim to ensure curation resources are applied to make the most valuable data findable, understandable, accessible, and usable. We analyze data from a domain repository for the social sciences that includes over 500,000 annual searches in 2014 and 2015 to better understand trends in user search behavior. Using a newly created search-to-study ratio technique, we identified gaps in the domain data repository’s holdings and leveraged this analysis to inform our collection and curation practices and policies. The evaluative technique we propose in this paper will serve as a baseline for future studies looking at trends in user demand over time at the domain data repository being studied with broader implications for other data repositories.

The paper introduces a model for interactive image retrieval utilising the geometrical framework of information retrieval (IR). We tackle the problem of image retrieval based on an expressive user information need in form of a textual-visual query, where a user is attempting to find an image similar to the picture in their mind during querying. The user information need is expressed using guided visual feedback based on Information Foraging which lets the user perception embed within the model via semantic Hilbert space (SHS). This framework is based on the mathematical formalism of quantum probabilities and aims to understand the relationship between user textual and image input, where the image in the input is considered a form of visual feedback. We propose SHS, a quantum-inspired approach where the textual-visual query is regarded analogously to a physical system that allows for modelling different system states and their dynamic changes thereof based on observations (such as queries, relevance judgements). We will be able to learn the input multimodal representation and relationships between textual-image queries for retrieving images. Our experiments are conducted on the MIT States and Fashion200k datasets that demonstrate the effectiveness of finding particular images autocratically when the user inputs are semantically expressive.

Nowadays, Internet is widely used by users to satisfy their various information needs. Whenever a user submits any query/topic/keyword to search engine, it provides a long list of results for same query. As a consequence of this, users have to spend a lot of time in searching information of his/her interest. Most of the time it has been seen that, search engine does not deliver most relevant information, and hence information need of user does not get satisfied. Hence to provide best results, an analysis of user search goal behind searching is essential. Inference and analysis of user search goals can help to get relevant and refined results from a search engine and to provide better user experience. In this paper, main focus is on survey of infer user search goal approaches in prior studies which would help researchers to retrieve efficient results and information.

Search and recommendation are the two most common approaches used by people\nto obtain information. They share the same goal -- satisfying the user's\ninformation need at the right time. There are already a lot of Internet\nplatforms and Apps providing both search and recommendation services, showing\nus the demand and opportunity to simultaneously handle both tasks. However,\nmost platforms consider these two tasks independently -- they tend to train\nseparate search model and recommendation model, without exploiting the\nrelatedness and dependency between them. In this paper, we argue that jointly\nmodeling these two tasks will benefit both of them and finally improve overall\nuser satisfaction. We investigate the interactions between these two tasks in\nthe specific information content service domain. We propose first integrating\nthe user's behaviors in search and recommendation into a heterogeneous behavior\nsequence, then utilizing a joint model for handling both tasks based on the\nunified sequence. More specifically, we design the Unified Information Search\nand Recommendation model (USER), which mines user interests from the integrated\nsequence and accomplish the two tasks in a unified way.\n

웹에 분산된 모든 윈 페이지는 구조가 서로 다르다. 시멘틱 웹 환경은 이형적인 구조를 갖는 웹 페이지들의 메타데이터 바탕으로 시멘틱 검색이 가능하다. 그러나 일반적으로 사용자의 요구에 따른 시멘틱 김색은 상황에 따라 엄청난 수의 검색 결과를 내놓는다. 따라서 검색 결과에 대해 각 사용자에 맞는 검색 결과 순위를 적용할 필요가 있다. Culture Finder는 시멘틱 웹 검색 에이전트들이 개인화 된 문화 정보를 검색할 수 있도록 도움을 준다. Culture Finder는 웹에 존재하는 각 웹 페이지에 대한 메타 데이터를 작성하고, 시멘틱 검색을 이행하며 사용자 프로파일을 기반으로 삼아 검색 결과에 대한 순위 점수를 계산한다. Culture Finder에는 개인화 된 시멘틱 검색을 효율적으로 실행하기 위해 중요한 5가지 기법이 적용되었다. 사용자의 검색 행위로부터 사용자 프로파일을 생성하기 위한 기계 학습기법, 시멘틱 웹 검색 에이전트를 위한 효율적인 시멘틱 검색 기법, 사용자 질의의 효과적인 파악을 위한 질의 분석 기법, 각 사용자에게 적합한 검색 결과를 제공하기 위한 순위 적용 기술, 메타데이터를 생성하기 위한 상위 온톨로지 표현 방법, 본 논문에서는 Culture Finder의 구조를 통해서 시멘틱 개인화 검색에 대한 기법을 제안한다. The semantic web environment promise semantic search of heterogeneous data from distributed web page. Semantic search would resuit in an overwhelming number of results for users is increased, therefore elevating the need for appropriate personalized ranking schemes. Culture Finder helps semantic web agents obtain personalized culture information. It extracts meta data for each web page(culture news, culture performance, culture exhibition), perform semantic search and compute result ranking point to base user profile. In order to work efficient, Culture Finder uses five major technique: Machine learning technique for generating user profile from user search behavior and meta data repository, an efficient semantic search system for semantic web agent, query analysis for representing query and query result, personalized ranking method to provide suitable search result to user, upper ontology for generating meta data. In this paper, we also present the structure used in the Culture Finder to support personalized search service.