Adaptive information retrieval support for multi-session information tasks Daniel Backhausen1 , Claus-Peter Klas2 , and Matthias Hemmje1 1
Distance University in Hagen, Germany Daniel.Backhausen,
[email protected] 2 GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
[email protected]
Abstract. Goals and corresponding tasks are both major drivers of information needs which are satisfied within information behaviours and lead to information tasks and finally information retrieval. Changing goals or a changing information need and task interruption during execution are the two most challenging barriers of people working on complex and longitudinal goals or tasks. People often have problems re-locating already visited pages or recapturing previous queries and their results. Thus the support of task-based information retrieval is still not sufficient today. Due to this we examined new concepts that make task-based information retrieval more efficient and useful. Keywords: Interactive information retrieval, task-based information retrieval, adaptive systems, personalized search, task management
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Introduction
Today researchers agree that work goals and corresponding work tasks are the leading drivers for creating information needs (e.g. [1][2][8]). Each one of us has work goals which are either job-related or may be driven by personal interests. Complex goals like writing a funding proposal, building a house, or the restoration of a classic car, can take hours, days, or even months to complete. To achieve such a goal, it is necessary to execute and complete derived tasks since they define concretely what has to be done. In addition, executing a task requires a particular knowledge which might already exists for routine tasks that are executed regularly. But if a task has never been done before, there is normally a lack of knowledge which hinders its execution and completion. Hence specific information is needed and we enter into an information task, i.e., an information seeking behaviour and within this behaviour we quite often initiate a corresponding information retrieval task to acquire the missing knowledge. During the different stages of such an information task processing, the required knowledge changes from more general up to more specific. This influences how we seek and search for information, i.e., it influcences the information retrieval tasks that we are initiating.
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In this way, searching for information by means of initiating information or more specifically information retrieval tasks, is an important support action for many work tasks. Project- and task-management tools support users to manage their work on such work goals in work tasks and work sub-tasks. Unfortunately, they do not not use this explicitly provided information about the work task to support the related information tasks, i.e., to e.g. support the corresponding information retrieval tasks at hand and to contextualize and in this way personalize our web-based information searches. On the other hand different web-based information support services are trying to help users to find pages that contain relevant information, but unfortunately they do not have any awareness about their users’ work context, i.e., their current work goal or current work task and thus this kind of knowledge is not part of the relevance calculation of the underlying information retrieval mechanism. This is also true for information about the stage or status and the complexity of the work task, the corresponding information tasks, possible sub-tasks or higher level tasks, and information already explored in previous work task contexts and their information tasks. Our current research activities tackle this problem by proposing new concepts of task-supported information retrieval focusing on complex goals and work tasks that span over multiple sessions and which might be executed in parallel. Through the support of an integrated task tool, we are aiming at enabling users to structure their goals at hand into tasks and sub-tasks and utilize this explicit information as an important part of representing the users’ current work and information context in a machine readable way. Assuming that a task is explicitely represented and managed in this way, all implicit and explicit user interaction over several work sessions is stored with reference to this task. Having the task specific context information at hand we are then able to implement system support features and user awareness features like task-based personalization, recommendation, and adaptivity which we will present in the next chapter.
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Concepts and Prototype
Based on and in extend to previous work like [3][4][5][6][7][9] we want to introduce three new concepts to increase task performance and to get a higher usefulness in supporting users within their tasks. To test and evaluate these concepts, we implemented a prototype called TasksTodo, which is an add-on for the web browser Firefox. The implementation as a browser add-on allows us to realize the concept of integrating task management directly into web-based information retrieval activities. As discussed earlier, realistic work situations can be longitudinal and multifaceted and thus very complex. The current task is a major factor for the situational information need, but beyond that it is often only a partial view on the overall work definition. Hence it is necessary to also take the goal and the overall task structure into account when supporting the user during task completion. This way it is e.g. possible to determine task complexity and predict
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next steps. For that reason we propose a first concept, using the overall information about the work goal and its tasks, not only limiting to the current task. Therefore TasksTodo allows users to create an arbitrary number of goals and within each goal users can define an arbitrary number of tasks on different levels (i.e. a task which contains sub-tasks). This allows grouping of concrete tasks to an abstract goal. For each goal and task it is possible to define its name or title, the urgency and priority, and the due date. Goals and tasks can be flagged as completed, to reduce situational importance.
Fig. 1. TasksTodo - Search page adaption and task-related history
One of the main problems users have with longitudinal multi-session tasks is task interruption and resumption. Hence, for task efficiency it is important to support users in such situations. People need to get a quick overview on their past activities related to a certain task to easily continue work. For the web these activities are at least the last opened tabs, visited pages, and bookmarks. Our second concept enhances the previous research mentioned above. In TasksTodo all information retrieval activities are tracked in relation to the selected task. In this way, users can use the task-related history to review the last visited pages within a certain task. Users can can also restore the tabs of the last task session. Besides this, TasksTodo allows to easily manage task-related bookmarks. For example this can be done using the context menu of the browser upon a web page or link. Each bookmark automatically contains the page title, the URL, and the date it has been created. In addition it also takes a screenshot and stores the complete page content for later use. TasksTodo offeres support for switching between goals and tasks due to multiple task execution.
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The third concept we want to introduce here is task-based adaption. Part of our tracking of browser activities is the visit and use of search engines. This allows us to offer support for information search across different services (domains) and enables us to provide further features like the adaption of functionality and content of the retrieval system. TasksTodo visualizes the last five queries for Google, Google Scholar, Bing, Microsoft Academic Search, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, and the digital library system of Gesis related to the current work task. This way users can easily re-capture and re-execute last search activities. TasksTodo also modifies bookmarked pages by adding a green top bar with a notification to the page. This indicates a page as bookmarked, therefore, being relevant for the current task. Contrariwise it is also possible to flag pages as not being relevant according to the current task resulting in a red bar with a notification on the top of the page. This information will be used in future to adapt the result lists. The title of the selected task is set as a parameter to the visited URL (e.g. http://example.org?tt_task=my+task+title). Therefore page providers could use this information to adapt their page and content to the users current task. In that or a similar way adaption can also be provided by page providers. More information about the TasksTodo project and a link to download the software can be found at taskstodo.org.
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