An Investigation of the Query Behavior in Task-based Collaborative Exploratory Web Search

摘要

Collaboration in the information seeking and retrievalenvironment is common, particularly when the search taskis complex and exploratory. Multiple factors such ascontextual features and task type can affect users’ querybehavior. This paper presents a study investigating theeffects of collaboration and task types on users’ querybehavior. The study involves two conditions: collaborativesearch and individual search, and the two search tasks: therecall-oriented information-gathering and the utility-baseddecision-making. We analyze users’ query behavior inthree dimensions: basic query features (e.g. the number ofqueries), query reformulation patterns (e.g. New,Specification, Generalization and Reconstruction) andquery performance. The findings of this study reveal thatqueries are more diverse in collaborative search and recallorientedtasks. Users employed New and Specializationmore often as query reformulation types in collaborativesearch while people in individual search use Reconstructionmore often. Besides, the successful query rate is higher inindividual search and recall-oriented tasks.