SIGIR '02 Proceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Evaluating implicit measures to improve web search
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Task difficulty as a predictor and indicator of web searching interaction
CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
SIGIR '06 Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
A study on the effects of personalization and task information on implicit feedback performance
CIKM '06 Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
A faceted approach to conceptualizing tasks in information seeking
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
TREC genomics special issue overview
Information Retrieval
Characterizing and predicting search engine switching behavior
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management
How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Search behaviors in different task types
Proceedings of the 10th annual joint conference on Digital libraries
Predicting searcher frustration
Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Can search systems detect users' task difficulty?: some behavioral signals
Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Predicting task difficulty for different task types
Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem - Volume 47
Modeling and analysis of cross-session search tasks
Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval
Find it if you can: a game for modeling different types of web search success using interaction data
Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval
Detecting success in mobile search from interaction
Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval
Predicting query performance via classification
ECIR'2010 Proceedings of the 32nd European conference on Advances in Information Retrieval
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Conference on information & knowledge management
Why Do Users Perceive Search Tasks As Difficult? Exploring Difficulty in Different Task Types
Proceedings of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval
Hi-index | 0.00 |
We report on an investigation of behavioral differences between users in difficult and easy search tasks. Behavioral factors that can be used in real-time to predict task difficulty are identified. User data was collected in a controlled lab experiment (n=38) where each participant completed four search tasks in the genomics domain. We looked at user behaviors that can be obtained by systems at three levels, distinguished by the time point when the measurements can be done. They are: 1) first-round level at the beginning of the search, 2) accumulated level during the search, and 3) whole-session level by the end of the search. Results show that a number of user behaviors at all three levels differed between easy and difficult tasks. Models predicting task difficulty at all three levels were developed and evaluated. A real-time model incorporating first-round and accumulated levels of behaviors (FA) had fairly good prediction performance (accuracy 83%; precision 88%), which is comparable with the model using the whole-session level behaviors which are not real-time (accuracy 75%; precision 92%). We also found that for efficiency purpose, using only a limited number of significant variables (FC_FA) can obtain a prediction accuracy of 75%, with a precision of 88%. Our findings can help search systems predict task difficulty and adapt search results to users.