On the Effects of Automatically Generated Adjunct Questions for Search as Learning

Actively engaging learners with learning materials has been shown to be very important in the Search as Learning (SAL) setting. One active reading strategy relies on asking so-called adjunct questions, i.e., manually curated questions geared towards essential concepts of the target material. However, manual question creation is impractical...

In a Hurry: How Time Constraints and the Presentation of Web Search Results Affect User Behaviour and Experience

Time constraints are commonplace in our daily lives. While literature in recent years from the Information Retrieval (IR) community has increased our understanding of the effects of time constraints on search, practical effects on search outcomes have rarely been evaluated. Little is known about how different search interfaces influence search...

Hear Me Out: A Study on the Use of the Voice Modality for Crowdsourced Relevance Assessments

The creation of relevance assessments by human assessors (often nowadays crowdworkers) is a vital step when building IR test collections. Prior works have investigated assessor quality & behaviour, and tooling to support assessors in their task. We have few insights though into the impact of a document's presentation modality on assessor...

Driven to Distraction: Examining the Influence of Distractors on Search Behaviours, Performance and Experience

Advertisements, sponsored links, clickbait, in-house recommendations and similar elements pervasively shroud featured content. Such elements vie for people's attention, potentially distracting people from their task at hand. The effects of such "distractors"is likely to increase people's cognitive workload and reduce their performance as they...

First Early Career Researchers Roundtable for Information Access Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we work, study, and conduct research. Ongoing stresses and uncertainties of the pandemic have impacted research activities and collaborations, especially for graduate researchers1 and Early Career Researchers (ECRs)2. It has also changed the way we connect with the broader research communities. For...

Users and Contemporary SERPs: A (Re-)Investigation: Examining User Interactions and Experiences

The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has evolved significantly over the last two decades, moving away from the simple ten blue links paradigm to considerably more complex presentations that contain results from multiple verticals and granularities of textual information. Prior works have investigated how user interactions on the SERP are...

Searching, Learning, and Subtopic Ordering: A Simulation-Based Analysis

Complex search tasks—such as those from the Search as Learning (SAL) domain—often result in users developing an information need composed of several aspects. However, current models of searcher behaviour assume that individuals have an atomic need, regardless of the task. While these models generally work well for simpler informational needs,...

Note the Highlight: Incorporating Active Reading Tools in a Search as Learning Environment

Active reading strategies - -such as content annotations (through the use of highlighting and note-taking, for example) - -have been shown to yield improvements to a learner's knowledge and understanding of the topic being explored. This has been especially notable in long and complex learning endeavours. With web search engines nowadays used...

Developing contemporary web-based interaction logging infrastructure: The design and challenges of LogUI

Studies involving user interfaces typically involve the capturing and recording (logging) of key user interactions between the user and the system being examined. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that researchers often implement their own logging infrastructure-sometimes in a piecemeal fashion-which can lead to numerous implementation...

Sim4IR: The SIGIR 2021 Workshop on Simulation for Information Retrieval Evaluation

The use of simulation techniques is not foreign to information retrieval. In the past, simulation has been employed, for example, for constructing test collections and for model performance prediction and analysis in a broad array of information access scenarios. Nevertheless, a standardized methodology for performance evaluation via...

Incorporating Widget Positioning in Interaction Models of Search Behaviour

Models developed to simulate user interactions with search interfaces typically do not consider the visual layout and presentation of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). In particular, the position and size of interfacewidgets ---such as entity cards and query suggestions---are usually considered a negligible constant. In contrast, in this work...

How Do Active Reading Strategies Affect Learning Outcomes in Web Search?

Prior work in education research has shown that various active reading strategies, notably highlighting and note-taking, benefit learning outcomes. Most of these findings are based on observational studies where learners learn from a single document. In a Search as Learning (SAL) context where learners have to iteratively scan and explore a...

The Impact of Entity Cards on Learning-Oriented Search Tasks

Entity cards are a common occurrence in today's web Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). SERPs provide information on a complex information object in a structured manner. Typically, they combine data from several search verticals. They have been shown to: (i) increase users' engagement with the SERP; and (ii) improve decision making for certain...

Searching to Learn with Instructional Scaffolding

Web search engines are today considered to be the primary tool to assist and empower learners in finding information relevant to their learning goals- be it learning something new, improving their existing skills, or just fulfilling a curiosity. While several approaches for improving search engines for the learning scenario have been proposed...

LogUI: Contemporary Logging Infrastructure for Web-Based Experiments

Logging user interactions is fundamental to capturing and subsequently analysing user behaviours in the context of web-based Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR). However, logging is often implemented within experimental apparatus in a piecemeal fashion, leading to incomplete or noisy data. To address these issues, we present the LogUI...