Personalizing Information Retrieval for Multi-session Tasks: Examining the Roles of Task Stage, Task Type, and Topic Knowledge on the Interpretation of Dwell Time as an Indicator of Document Usefulness

Jingjing Liu

Abstract:

Personalization of information retrieval tailors search
towards individual users to meet their particular information
needs by taking into account information about
users and their contexts, often through implicit sources
of evidence such as user behaviors. This study looks at
users’ dwelling behavior on documents and several contextual
factors: the stage of users’ work tasks, task type,
and users’ knowledge of task topics, to explore whether
or not taking account contextual factors could help infer
document usefulness from dwell time. A controlled laboratory
experiment was conducted with 24 participants,
each coming 3 times to work on 3 subtasks in a general
work task. The results show that task stage could help
interpret certain types of dwell time as reliable indicators
of document usefulness in certain task types, as was
topic knowledge, and the latter played a more significant
role when both were available. This study contributes to
a better understanding of how dwell time can be used as
implicit evidence of document usefulness, as well as
how contextual factors can help interpret dwell time
as an indicator of usefulness. These findings have both
theoretical and practical implications for using behaviors
and contextual factors in the development of personalization
systems.