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Directing and Combining Multiple Queries for Exploratory Search by Visual Interactive Intent Modeling

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (INTERACT 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12934))

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Abstract

In interactive information-seeking, a user often performs many interrelated queries and interactions covering multiple aspects of a broad topic of interest. Especially in difficult information-seeking tasks the user may need to find what is in common among such multiple aspects. Therefore, the user may need to compare and combine results across queries. While methods to combine queries or rankings have been proposed, little attention has been paid to interactive support for combining multiple queries in exploratory search. We introduce an interactive information retrieval system for exploratory search with multiple simultaneous search queries that can be combined. The user is able to direct search in the multiple queries, and combine queries by two operations: intersection and difference, which reveal what is relevant to the user intent of two queries, and what is relevant to one but not the other. Search is directed by relevance feedback on visualized user intent models of each query. Operations on queries act directly on the intent models inferring a combined user intent model. Each combination yields a new result (ranking) and acts as a new search that can be interactively directed and further combined. User experiments on difficult information-seeking tasks show that our novel system with query operations yields more relevant top-ranked documents in a shorter time than a baseline multiple-query system.

Work supported by Academy of Finland (FCAI flagship and grants 313748 & 327352), Business Finland (grants 2115754 & 211548), and Aalto Science-IT.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Jonathan Strahl & Patrik Floréen

  2. Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Jaakko Peltonen

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Patrik Floréen

Authors
  1. Jonathan Strahl
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  2. Jaakko Peltonen
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  3. Patrik Floréen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jaakko Peltonen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Ardito

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Rosa Lanzilotti

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Alessio Malizia

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Helen Petrie

  5. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Antonio Piccinno

  6. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Giuseppe Desolda

  7. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Kori Inkpen

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Strahl, J., Peltonen, J., Floréen, P. (2021). Directing and Combining Multiple Queries for Exploratory Search by Visual Interactive Intent Modeling. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12934. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85613-7_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85613-7_34

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-85613-7

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