Does More Context Help? Effects of Context Window and Application Source on Retrieval Performance

2022 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Tung Vuong ◽  
Salvatore Andolina ◽  
Giulio Jacucci ◽  
Tuukka Ruotsalo
Keyword(s):  
Web Search ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Context Condition ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Search Queries ◽  
Web Document ◽  
Context Models ◽  
Search History

We study the effect of contextual information obtained from a user’s digital trace on Web search performance. Contextual information is modeled using Dirichlet–Hawkes processes (DHP) and used in augmenting Web search queries. The context is captured by monitoring all naturally occurring user behavior using continuous 24/7 recordings of the screen and associating the context with the queries issued by the users. We report a field study in which 13 participants installed a screen recording and digital activity monitoring system on their laptops for 14 days, resulting in data on all Web search queries and the associated context data. A query augmentation (QAug) model was built to expand the original query with semantically related terms. The effects of context window and source were determined by training context models with temporally varying context windows and varying application sources. The context models were then utilized to re-rank the QAug model. We evaluate the context models by using the Web document rankings of the original query as a control condition compared against various experimental conditions: (1) a search context condition in which the context was sourced from search history; (2) a non-search context condition in which the context was sourced from all interactions excluding search history; (3) a comprehensive context condition in which the context was sourced from both search and non-search histories; and (4) an application-specific condition in which the context was sourced from interaction histories captured on a specific application type. Our results indicated that incorporating more contextual information significantly improved Web search rankings as measured by the positions of the documents on which users clicked in the search result pages. The effects and importance of different context windows and application sources, along with different query types are analyzed, and their impact on Web search performance is discussed.

The influence of snippet length on user behavior in mobile web search

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Sachse
Keyword(s):  
Web Search ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Mobile Web ◽  
Dependent Variables ◽  
Search Engine Result ◽  
Desktop Search ◽  
Query Type

Purpose Web search is more and more moving into mobile contexts. However, screen size of mobile devices is limited and search engine result pages face a trade-off between offering informative snippets and optimal use of space. One factor clearly influencing this trade-off is snippet length. The purpose of this paper is to find out what snippet size to use in mobile web search. Design/methodology/approach For this purpose, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted showing participants search interfaces with snippets of one, three or five lines on a mobile device to analyze 17 dependent variables. In total, 31 participants took part in the study. Each of the participants solved informational and navigational tasks. Findings Results indicate a strong influence of page fold on scrolling behavior and attention distribution across search results. Regardless of query type, short snippets seem to provide too little information about the result, so that search performance and subjective measures are negatively affected. Long snippets of five lines lead to better performance than medium snippets for navigational queries, but to worse performance for informational queries. Originality/value Although space in mobile search is limited, this study shows that longer snippets improve usability and user experience. It further emphasizes that page fold plays a stronger role in mobile than in desktop search for attention distribution.

A Survey on Improving the Web Search Ranking by User Behavior Information

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Husain ◽  
Amarjeet Singh ◽  
Manoj Kumar ◽  
Rakesh Ranjan
Keyword(s):  
Web Search ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
The Web ◽  
Web Search Ranking

A service-oriented context-awareness reasoning framework and its implementation

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1114-1134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiufeng Cheng ◽  
Jinqing Yang ◽  
Lixin Xia
Keyword(s):  
Context Awareness ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Sensor Data ◽  
Context Information ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Service Oriented ◽  
High Level

PurposeThis paper aims to propose an extensible, service-oriented framework for context-aware data acquisition, description, interpretation and reasoning, which facilitates the development of mobile applications that provide a context-awareness service.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the authors propose the context data reasoning framework (CDRFM) for generating service-oriented contextual information. Then they used this framework to composite mobile sensor data into low-level contextual information. Finally, the authors exploited some high-level contextual information that can be inferred from the formatted low-level contextual information using particular inference rules.FindingsThe authors take “user behavior patterns” as an exemplary context information generation schema in their experimental study. The results reveal that the optimization of service can be guided by the implicit, high-level context information inside user behavior logs. They also prove the validity of the authors’ framework.Research limitations/implicationsFurther research will add more variety of sensor data. Furthermore, to validate the effectiveness of our framework, more reasoning rules need to be performed. Therefore, the authors may implement more algorithms in the framework to acquire more comprehensive context information.Practical implicationsCDRFM expands the context-awareness framework of previous research and unifies the procedures of acquiring, describing, modeling, reasoning and discovering implicit context information for mobile service providers.Social implicationsSupport the service-oriented context-awareness function in application design and related development in commercial mobile software industry.Originality/valueExtant researches on context awareness rarely considered the generation contextual information for service providers. The CDRFM can be used to generate valuable contextual information by implementing more reasoning rules.

The Effects of Context on the Comprehension of Graphic Symbols

1993 ◽  
Vol 37 (8) ◽  
pp. 511-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Vukelich ◽  
Leslie A. Whitaker
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Context Condition ◽  
Intended Meaning ◽  
Graphic Symbols ◽  
Use Context ◽  
Symbol Comprehension ◽  
Information Comprehension ◽  
Comprehension Accuracy

When graphic symbols are used to convey warning information, these symbols must be evaluated for effectiveness prior to their use. In general, the ability of these symbols to convey their intended meaning has been determined in tests which provide no contextual information surrounding the symbols. In the present study, 75 university students were tested to determine their comprehension of twenty different symbols using various context conditions. Verbal context was provided in two forms: full context and partial context. Full context consisted of a two- sentence description of the setting in which the symbol would be presented. Partial context consisted of a more general, two-word description of the use context. The control condition presented the symbols without contextual information. Comprehension was higher when full context was provided with the symbols than when the symbols were presented in isolation. For some symbols, the full context condition resulted in higher comprehension than the partial context condition and the partial context condition resulted in higher comprehension than the no context condition. Comprehension accuracy was also affected by the subject's familiarity with the symbols. Comprehension was higher for symbols rated high in familiarity than for symbols rated lower in familiarity. On the basis of these findings, a recommendation was made that evaluations should provide some form of contextual information along with the symbols to allow a more realistic test of symbol comprehension.

Enhancing Web Search through Query Expansion

2011 ◽  
pp. 752-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Crabtree
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Query Expansion ◽  
Web Search ◽  
User Involvement ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Interactive Query ◽  
Web Search Engines

Web search engines help users find relevant web pages by returning a result set containing the pages that best match the user’s query. When the identified pages have low relevance, the query must be refined to capture the search goal more effectively. However, finding appropriate refinement terms is difficult and time consuming for users, so researchers developed query expansion approaches to identify refinement terms automatically. There are two broad approaches to query expansion, automatic query expansion (AQE) and interactive query expansion (IQE) (Ruthven et al., 2003). AQE has no user involvement, which is simpler for the user, but limits its performance. IQE has user involvement, which is more complex for the user, but means it can tackle more problems such as ambiguous queries. Searches fail by finding too many irrelevant pages (low precision) or by finding too few relevant pages (low recall). AQE has a long history in the field of information retrieval, where the focus has been on improving recall (Velez et al., 1997). Unfortunately, AQE often decreased precision as the terms used to expand a query often changed the query’s meaning (Croft and Harper (1979) identified this effect and named it query drift). The problem is that users typically consider just the first few results (Jansen et al., 2005), which makes precision vital to web search performance. In contrast, IQE has historically balanced precision and recall, leading to an earlier uptake within web search. However, like AQE, the precision of IQE approaches needs improvement. Most recently, approaches have started to improve precision by incorporating semantic knowledge.

Associating Searching on Search Engines to Subsequent Searching on Sites

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Adan Ortiz-Cordova ◽  
Bernard J. Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Search Engine ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Web Search ◽  
Research Study ◽  
Search Queries ◽  
Web Search Engine ◽  
Search Patterns ◽  
Search Information

In this research study, the authors investigate the association between external searching, which is searching on a web search engine, and internal searching, which is searching on a website. They classify 295,571 external – internal searches where each search is composed of a search engine query that is submitted to a web search engine and then one or more subsequent queries submitted to a commercial website by the same user. The authors examine 891,453 queries from all searches, of which 295,571 were external search queries and 595,882 were internal search queries. They algorithmically classify all queries into states, and then clustered the searching episodes into major searching configurations and identify the most commonly occurring search patterns for both external, internal, and external-to-internal searching episodes. The research implications of this study are that external sessions and internal sessions must be considered as part of a continuous search episode and that online businesses can leverage external search information to more effectively target potential consumers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document