Abstract
Interactive query expansion can assist users during their query formulation process. We conducted a user study with over 4,000 unique visitors and four different design approaches for a search term suggestion service. As a basis for our evaluation we have implemented services which use three different vocabularies: (1) user search terms, (2) terms from a terminology service and (3) thesaurus terms. Additionally, we have created a new combined service which utilizes thesaurus term and terms from a domain-specific search term recommender. Our results show that the thesaurus-based method clearly is used more often compared to the other single-method implementations. We interpret this as a strong indicator that term suggestion mechanisms should be domain-specific to be close to the user terminology. Our novel combined approach which interconnects a thesaurus service with additional statistical relations outperformed all other implementations. All our observations show that domain-specific vocabulary can support the user in finding alternative concepts and formulating queries.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aula, A., Jhaveri, N., Käki, M.: Information search and re-access strategies of experienced web users. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 583–592. ACM, New York (2005)
Belkin, N.J.: Anomalous states of knowledge as a basis for information retrieval. Canadian Journal of Information Science 5, 133–143 (1980)
Bhogal, J., Macfarlane, A., Smith, P.: A review of ontology based query expansion. Inf. Process. Manage. 43, 866–886 (2007)
Cucerzan, S., Brill, E.: Spelling Correction as an Iterative Process that Exploits the Collective Knowledge of Web Users. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP (2004)
Efthimiadis, E.N.: Query expansion. Annual Review of Information Systems and Technology (ARIST) 31, 121–187 (1996)
Furnas, G.W., Landauer, T.K., Gomez, L.M., Dumais, S.T.: The Vocabulary Problem in Human-System Communication. Commun. ACM 30(11), 964–971 (1987)
Hargittai, E.: Hurdles to information seeking: Spelling and typographical mistakes during users’ online behavior. Journal of the Association of Information Systems 7(1), 52–67 (2006)
Hearst, M.: Search User Interaces. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2009)
Jansen, B.J., Spink, A., Koshman, S.: Web searcher interaction with the Dogpile.com metasearch engine. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 58, 744–755 (2007)
Kelly, D., Gyllstrom, K., Bailey, E.W.: A comparison of query and term suggestion features for interactive searching. In: Proceedings of the 32nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 371–378 (2009)
Marchionini, G., White, R., Belkin, N., Golovchinsky, G., Kelly, D., Pirolli, P., Schraefel, M.: Information Seeking Support Systems: An invitational workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation (2008)
Mayr, P., Petras, V.: Cross-concordances: terminology mapping and its effectiveness for information retrieval. In: 74th IFLA World Library and Information Congress, Québec, Canada (2008)
Nettle, D.: Segmental inventory size, word length, and communicative efficiency. Linguistics 2, 359–367 (1995)
Petras, V.: How one word can make all the difference - using subject metadata for automatic query expansion and reformulation. In: Peters, C., Gey, F.C., Gonzalo, J., Müller, H., Jones, G.J.F., Kluck, M., Magnini, B., de Rijke, M., Giampiccolo, D. (eds.) CLEF 2005. LNCS, vol. 4022, pp. 21–23. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Plaunt, C., Norgard, B.A.: An association-based method for automatic indexing with a controlled vocabulary. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 49, 888–902 (1998)
Schatz, B.R., Johnson, E.H., Cochrane, P.A., Chen, H.: Interactive term suggestion for users of digital libraries: using subject thesauri and co-occurrence lists for information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the First ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 126–133. ACM, New York (1996)
Shiri, A., Revie, C.: Query expansion behavior within a thesaurus-enhanced search environment: A user-centered evaluation. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 57, 462–478 (2006)
Vechtomova, O., Robertson, S., Jones, S.: Query Expansion with Long-Span Collocates. Inf. Retr. 6, 251–273 (2003)
White, R.W., Bilenko, M., Cucerzan, S.: Studying the use of popular destinations to enhance web search interaction. In: Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 159–166. ACM, New York (2007)
White, R.W., Marchionini, G.: Examining the effectiveness of real-time query expansion. Inf. Process. Manage. 43, 685–704 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hienert, D., Schaer, P., Schaible, J., Mayr, P. (2011). A Novel Combined Term Suggestion Service for Domain-Specific Digital Libraries. In: Gradmann, S., Borri, F., Meghini, C., Schuldt, H. (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. TPDL 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6966. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24469-8_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24469-8_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24468-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24469-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)