The effects of Domain Expertise on A User's Conversational Search
R.R. Sobha (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
C Hauff – Mentor (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)
N. Tintarev – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
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.