scholarly journals “What Can I Cook with these Ingredients?” - Understanding Cooking-Related Information Needs in Conversational Search

2022 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Alexander Frummet ◽  
David Elsweiler ◽  
Bernd Ludwig

As conversational search becomes more pervasive, it becomes increasingly important to understand the users’ underlying information needs when they converse with such systems in diverse domains. We conduct an in situ study to understand information needs arising in a home cooking context as well as how they are verbally communicated to an assistant. A human experimenter plays this role in our study. Based on the transcriptions of utterances, we derive a detailed hierarchical taxonomy of diverse information needs occurring in this context, which require different levels of assistance to be solved. The taxonomy shows that needs can be communicated through different linguistic means and require different amounts of context to be understood. In a second contribution, we perform classification experiments to determine the feasibility of predicting the type of information need a user has during a dialogue using the turn provided. For this multi-label classification problem, we achieve average F1 measures of 40% using BERT-based models. We demonstrate with examples which types of needs are difficult to predict and show why, concluding that models need to include more context information in order to improve both information need classification and assistance to make such systems usable.

2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saeema Ahmed ◽  
Bo T. Christensen

This paper describes a study to understand the use of analogies by design engineers with different levels of experience in an adaptive design domain. Protocol analyses of 12 design engineers have been analyzed to understand the functions and reasoning of the analogies. The protocols are real-world data from the aerospace industry. The findings indicate a significant difference in both the use of analogies by novices and experienced designers and the reasoning from the analogies. Novices were found to predominantly transfer information related to the geometric properties without explicit reference to relevant design issues or to the appropriateness of applying the analogy, whereas experienced designers tended to use analogies for problem solving and problem identification. Experienced designers were found to use the analogy to reason about the function of a component and the predicted behavior of the component, whereas the novices seem to lack such reasoning processes.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Qing Ke ◽  
Jia Tina Du ◽  
Lu Ji

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand how the contextual factors of health crisis information needs are different from a general health context and how these factors work together to shape human information needs.Design/methodology/approachThis study collected the COVID-19-related questions posted on a Chinese social Q&A website for a period of 90 days since the pandemic outbreak in China. A qualitative thematic approach was applied to analyze the 1,681 valid questions using an open coding process.FindingsA taxonomy of information need topics for a health crisis context that identifies 8 main categories and 33 subcategories was developed, from which four overarching themes were extracted. These include understanding, clarification and preparation; affection expression of worries and confidence; coping with a challenging situation and resuming normal life; and social roles in the pandemic. The authors discussed the differences between a health crisis and a normal health context shaping information needs. Finally, a conceptual framework was developed to illustrate the typology, nature and triggers of health crisis information needs.Research limitations/implicationsFirst, only the Baidu Zhidao platform was investigated, and caution is advised before assuming the generalizability of the results, as the questioners of Baidu Zhidao are not representative of the whole population. Furthermore, since at the time of writing the COVID-19 is still in an emerging and evolving situation (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020), the collected data included only a relatively small sample size compared to the post-pandemic period, and this might have impact on the interpretation of the study’s findings.Practical implicationsThe study’s taxonomy of information needs provides a reference for indexing and organizing related information during a disaster.Social implicationsThe study helps authoritative organizations track and send information in social media and to inform about policies related to the pandemic (e.g., quarantine and traffic control policies in our study) to the right people in the right regions and settings when the next disaster emerges.Originality/valueThe taxonomy of information need topics for a health crisis context can be used to index and organize related information during a disaster and support many information agents to enhance their information service practices. It also deepens the understanding of the formation mechanism of information needs during a global health crisis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ojewole, Foluso ◽  
Oludipe, Yemisi O.

Background: Pregnant women attending antenatal care have a need for quality pregnancy-related information. Purpose: To describe the pregnancy-related information seeking patterns among pregnant women attending antenatal clinic in Ikorodu. Methods and Design: The study was carried out using a descriptive correlational design. A purposive sample of 228pregnant women were recruited from an antenatal clinic in Lagos State to complete pregnancy-related information seeking pattern questionnaire (PRISPQ).” Descriptive analysis and inferential statistics (logic regression) was used to analyse the information generated. Result: Over 50% respondents are in third trimester, age range 26-35years. Majority of the pregnant women in the study area had moderate level of pregnancy information needs (58.3%, mean = 28.007) and information-seeking (52.2%, mean = 26.119). Long wait to see the healthcare personnel (64.5%) and having knowledge of pregnancy (60.5%) are perceived barriers to seeking pregnancy-related information. The most potent predictor of information seeking pattern among the predictor variables of the study is religion (β = .372; t = 8.419; p < .05), followed by age (β= .300; t = 6.335; p <.05), and lastly by marital status (β= .261; t = 4.456; p <.05). Conclusion: Pregnancy outcomes could be improved if pregnant women are provided with pregnancy-related information necessary to empower them to overcome pregnancy challenges. Thus, nurses and midwives should offer quality information that could assist the pregnant women to make rightful healthcare decision during antenatal.


2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 63-69
Author(s):  
E. A. Frolova

The article presents an analysis of three poems about war («The Tale of Our Lady and Russian Soldiers» («Slovo o Bogoroditse i Russkih Soldatah»), «The Attack» («Ataka»), «The Forties» («Sorokovye»)) written by D. Samoylov in different periods of his creative activity. On the basis of the existing research of the creative work of the famous poet of the 20th century, a multilevel characteristic of his war lyrics is given. The aim of the article is to characterize the specific features of the poetic language of such an original author by means of a lingvo-stylistic analysis of D. Samoilov’s poems, to reveal the richness and diversity of his artistic manner. The following research methods were used: analytical reading, comparative analysis, ontological method, a multilevel analysis of poetry. The author accentuates reminiscences in D. Samoilov’s war poetry, the contrast and contrast means, repetition as an artistic device, paronomasia in the stylistic mixture of linguistic means belonging to different levels. A multidimensional poet’s approach to the theme of the war is the conclusion of the article.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2830
Author(s):  
Sili Wang ◽  
Mark P. Panning ◽  
Steven D. Vance ◽  
Wenzhan Song

Locating underground microseismic events is important for monitoring subsurface activity and understanding the planetary subsurface evolution. Due to bandwidth limitations, especially in applications involving planetarily-distributed sensor networks, networks should be designed to perform the localization algorithm in-situ, so that only the source location information needs to be sent out, not the raw data. In this paper, we propose a decentralized Gaussian beam time-reverse imaging (GB-TRI) algorithm that can be incorporated to the distributed sensors to detect and locate underground microseismic events with reduced usage of computational resources and communication bandwidth of the network. After the in-situ distributed computation, the final real-time location result is generated and delivered. We used a real-time simulation platform to test the performance of the system. We also evaluated the stability and accuracy of our proposed GB-TRI localization algorithm using extensive experiments and tests.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document