- Author
- Year
- 2017
- host editors
-
J.M. Jose
C. Hauff
I.S. Altıngovde
D. Song
D. Albakour
S. Watt
J. Tait - Title
- Do topic shift and query reformulation patterns correlate in academic search?
- Event
- 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2017
- Book/source title
- Advances in Information Retrieval
- Book/source subtitle
- 39th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2017, Aberdeen, UK, April 8–13, 2017 : proceedings
- Pages (from-to)
- 146-159
- Publisher
- Cham: Springer
- ISBN
- 9783319566078
- ISBN (electronic)
- 9783319566085
- Series
- Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 0302-9743, 1611-3349, 10193
- Document type
- Conference contribution
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science (FNWI)
- Institute
- Informatics Institute (IVI)
- Abstract
-
While it is known that academic searchers differ from typical web searchers, little is known about the search behavior of academic searchers over longer periods of time. In this study we take a look at academic searchers through a large-scale log analysis on a major academic search engine. We focus on two aspects: query reformulation patterns and topic shifts in queries. We first analyze how each of these aspects evolve over time. We identify important query reformulation patterns: revisiting and issuing new queries tend to happen more often over time. We also find that there are two distinct types of users: one type of users becomes increasingly focused on the topics they search for as time goes by, and the other becomes increasingly diversifying. After analyzing these two aspects separately, we investigate whether, and to which degree, there is a correlation between topic shifts and query reformulations. Surprisingly, users’ preferences of query reformulations correlate little with their topic shift tendency. However, certain reformulations may help predict the magnitude of the topic shift that happens in the immediate next timespan. Our results shed light on academic searchers’ information seeking behavior and may benefit search personalization.
- URL
- go to publisher's site
- Other links
- Link to publication in Scopus
- Language
- English
- Persistent Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/23454145-37d4-482a-86d8-ad31fed27376
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