Structure of domain novice users' queries to a history database
✍ Scribed by Charles Cole; John E. Leide; Emeka Nwakamma; Jamshid Beheshti; Andrew Large
- Publisher
- Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
- Year
- 2005
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 749 KB
- Volume
- 40
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0044-7870
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Abstract
This paper presents an information need identification system for interactive information retrieval (IR) for undergraduates researching a history topic, called the INIIReye System. The overall purpose of the INIIReye System is to facilitate domain novice user identification of their information need while they are online interacting with the information store. Here, we give preliminary results from a study that narrows undergraduates' initial topic statements to information need statements. Students may use a faulty accessing point in their queries because before information need identification they base their queries on broad topic terms. We first categorize the type of query terms used by users of an historical database provider, to create a taxonomy of query terms. Next, we use a case study of a history student who visually represents the narrows his essay topic in a series of steps. We conclude that our query taxonomy must include levels of topic specificity because while general topic‐based queries are inappropriate as query terms, more specific topic‐based queries may be closer to the domain novice user's real information need.