Investigating users' query formulations for cognitive search intents

Abstract

This study investigated query formulations by users with {\it Cognitive Search Intents} (CSIs), which are users' needs for the cognitive characteristics of documents to be retrieved, {\em e.g. comprehensibility, subjectivity, and concreteness. Our four main contributions are summarized as follows (i) we proposed an example-based method of specifying search intents to observe query formulations by users without biasing them by presenting a verbalized task description;(ii) we conducted a questionnaire-based user study and found that about half our subjects did not input any keywords representing CSIs, even though they were conscious of CSIs;(iii) our user study also revealed that over 50\% of subjects occasionally had experiences with searches with CSIs while our evaluations demonstrated that the performance of a current Web search engine was much lower when we not only considered users' topical search intents but also CSIs; and (iv) we demonstrated that a machine-learning-based query expansion could improve the performances for some types of CSIs.Our findings suggest users over-adapt to current Web search engines,and create opportunities to estimate CSIs with non-verbal user input.