The effects of Domain Expertise on A User's Conversational Search

Abstract

This paper delved into the effects of domain expertise on a user's conversational search, because as the use and acceptance of voice assistants increase the need for conversational search agent that can accommodate to a human characteristic such as domain expertise. Accommodating to disadvantaged users of web search as earlier works showed that users with low literacy and low spatial visualization abilities are strongly affected in their searches compared to users who do not suffer from these impairments. Prior research into domain expertise demonstrated the influence it has had on the querying behavior of users in web search. They found that domain experts included more domain specific jargon in their messages, made longer queries and spent less time per search task. This paper examined these findings in a conversational search setting. Contrary to these findings, no significant relation between the domain expertise level and any of these results could be established. However, conducting the experiment to assess these findings has provided insight into how users respond to a conversational search study such as this one.