Three Types of Feedback in Interactive Information Retrieval

Diane Kelly (University of North Carolina)

CSIRO ICT

DATE: 2008-05-21
TIME: 10:00:00 - 11:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

ABSTRACT:
Interactive information retrieval (IIR) is concerned with helping people find information via automated retrieval systems through interactions. IIR research addresses three major problem areas (1) understanding information seeking needs and behaviors; (2) developing retrieval systems that respond to information needs and support information seeking behaviors and interactions; and (3) developing methods and measures to study and evaluate behaviors, interactions and systems.

In this talk, I provide an overview of some IIR research projects which I've been involved with that address these problem areas. Projects addressing the first two areas are presented briefly. These projects examined explicit and implicit feedback and enhanced queries. An in-depth look at a recent study addressing the third area is then presented. This study examined the standard IIR system evaluation model and the variance introduced by this model on users' evaluation behaviors. In this study, sixty users completed three recall-oriented search tasks. Standard evaluation questionnaires were completed by users after each search task and at the end of the experimental session. Before completing the final questionnaire, some users were provided with feedback about their performances: some were told they did very well, some were told they did very poorly, some were told their actual performances and some were not provided with any feedback. Results and implications of this study are discussed.
BIO:
Dr. Diane Kelly has been an Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina since 2004. Kelly holds an undergraduate degree in psychology (University of Alabama), a graduate certificate in cognitive science, and a master's and Ph.D. in Information Science (all from Rutgers University). Her research interests are in the areas of interactive information retrieval systems, user behavior, evaluation methods and measurement, and research ethics. Kelly teaches courses in research methods, information retrieval, and Web development and was the recipient of the SILS Outstanding Teaching Award in 2007. Kelly is also a member of her university's review board for human research ethics.

Kelly's research has been published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Information Processing & Management, Journal of Natural Language Engineering, Conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Conference on Information Knowledge Management (CIKM), and the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). Kelly has participated in the annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) for 10 years and served as co-coordinator of the question answering track for 2 years.

Kelly is on the editorial boards of Information Processing & Management and the Journal of Information Retrieval and is co-editor of SIGIR Forum. She has served on the program committees of SIGIR, JCDL, CIKM, Human Language Technologies (HLT), and is the interactive IR area chair for the 2008 Information Interaction in Context Conference (IIiX '08). She reviews papers for a number of journals including JASIST, IP&M, IR, TOIS and TWe.

http://sils.unc.edu/~dianek/