Ying-Hsang Liu

Investigating the News Seeking Behavior of Young Adults

This study investigated the news-seeking and browsing behaviours of young adults, partly in the context of everyday life information seeking (ELIS), in order to explore their perceptions of and attitudes towards print and online news media. The study is significant because traditional print newspapers face a steady decline in their readership with the growth of free online content. Therefore, it is important to understand the online news-seeking behaviours of young adults to try and predict changes and trends in this field. A qualitative (interpretivist) approach was adopted and twenty university students were interviewed. Findings indicate that, contrary to expectations, print newspapers were still favoured by young people in this sample and the most successful online news disseminators were the ones who have attached themselves to a popular website. Finally, the impact of newspaper reading and publishing trends on library reading rooms is also discussed.

Do human-developed index terms help users? An experimental study of MeSH terms in biomedical searching

To what extent do MeSH terms improve search effectiveness of different kinds of users? We observed four different kinds of information seekers using an experimental information retrieval system: (1) search novices; (2) domain experts; (3) search experts and (4) medical librarians. The information needs were a subset of the relatively difficult topics originally created for the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). Effectiveness of retrieval was based on the relevance judgments provided by TREC. Participants searched either using a version of the system in which MeSH terms were displayed or another version in which they had to formulate their own terms. The results suggest that MeSH terms are more helpful in terms of precision for domain experts than for search experts. We speculate that this is because of the highly technical nature of the topics; only the domain experts had the knowledge to understand and therefore make use of the MeSH terms. The results advance our understanding of the usefulness of controlled vocabulary in interactive information retrieval systems.

Evaluating the impact of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms on different types of searchers

The usefulness of controlled vocabularies, exemplified by Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), was evaluated by a controlled user experiment.MeSH terms were most useful for domain experts in terms of precision measure.Domain knowledge was correlated with the precision score, whereas search training correlated with the recall score.This study demonstrated the feasibility of re-using a test collection originally created for evaluating the effectiveness of retrieval techniques for a controlled user experiment. To what extent do MeSH terms improve search effectiveness for different kinds of users? We observed four different kinds of information seekers using an experimental information retrieval system: (1) search novices; (2) domain experts; (3) search experts and (4) medical librarians. Participants searched using either a version of the system in which MeSH terms were displayed or another version in which they had to formulate their own terms. The information needs were a subset of the relatively difficult topics originally created for the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). Effectiveness of retrieval was based on the relevance judgments provided by TREC. The results of the study provide experimental evidence of the usefulness of MeSH terms and further identify the significant relationship between the user characteristics of domain knowledge and search training and the search performance in an interactive search environment.

The Use of RDA Elements in Support of FRBR User Tasks

Resource Description and Access (RDA) stipulates that certain “core” elements should always be included, where applicable, in bibliographic and authority records, due to their importance in supporting the user tasks defined in Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. However, the elements’ relative importance has not been empirically tested. This study investigates which elements in bibliographic records are currently most used in a university library catalog, by means of think-aloud sessions conducted by expert and non-expert users, who were assigned sets of typical bibliographic tasks. The results indicate that, in this context at least, the most utilized elements are not all core.

User Behavior during the Book Selection Process

We study user behavior during the stage of the book selection process in which people study the content of a book to decide whether it will be useful for their intended purpose. 24 undergraduates participated in a balanced study in which they were given a topic-book pair and asked to decide whether the book was useful for the topic; we report on the accuracy of the participants’ decisions, the extent to which they use the table-of-contents and the index, and the impact of the medium on the book selection process. We discuss barriers to accurate book selection and consider what can be learned, at the applied and theoretical levels, from further study of this activity.

A Vector Field Approach to Lexical Semantics

We report work in progress on measuring “forces” underlying the semantic drift by comparing it with plate tectonics in geology. Based on a brief survey of energy as a key concept in machine learning, and the Aristotelian concept of potentiality vs. actuality allowing for the study of energy and dynamics in language, we propose a field approach to lexical analysis. Until evidence to the contrary, it was assumed that a classical field in physics is appropriate to model word semantics. The approach used the distributional hypothesis to statistically model word meaning. We do not address the modelling of sentence meaning here. The computability of a vector field for the indexing vocabulary of the Reuters-21578 test collection by an emergent self-organizing map suggests that energy minima as learnables in machine learning presuppose concepts as energy minima in cognition. Our finding needs to be confirmed by a systematic evaluation.

Explicating Tacit Experiences In Organizations: Evidence From Online Interns' Discourse

AbstractIn this study, we will report an analysis of a large corpus of text (approximately 1.1 million words) produced by students over 6 semesters of an internship program. This study involves reconstructing the discourse about work used by students when interacting with each other about the dilemmas they experience in work and professional life. We are interested in explaining how interns, by using this discourse, frame the dilemmas they experience and approaches for handling those dilemmas. To do this we perform discourse analysis using computer aided text analysis tools. The analysis should help generate a better understanding of the way people, novices in particular, understand work. The analysis may also reveal ways to improve intervention into learning and knowledge management processes. In this way, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of knowledge management, which is an important contemporary problem for organizations and society.

Natural Search User Interfaces for Complex Biomedical Search: An Eye Tracking Study

Abstract Controlled vocabularies such as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) have been extensively used to organise information resources in the biomedical domain. However, the usefulness of these terms for information access has not been rigorously evaluated in interactive search environments. The objective of this study was to gain an understanding of domain experts’ interactions with novel search interfaces within the context of biomedical information search, with a goal of better interface design of information retrieval systems. An eye tracking study of biomedical domain experts’ interactions with novel search interfaces was conducted, considering user’s individual differences and gaze behaviour. The findings suggest that types of search interfaces have significant effects on gaze behaviour in terms of fixation-based measures of areas of interest, i.e. visual attention to the elements of title, author, abstract and MeSH terms in document surrogates. Significant interaction effects between cognitive style and user interaction with search interfaces were found, specifically the amount of attention to MeSH terms by analytic and wholistic searchers. These findings contribute to our understanding of the relationship between cognitive styles and gaze patterns in information search. Based on these findings, the implications of individual differences and gaze behaviour for search interface design are discussed.

Reindexing a Research Repository from the Ground up: Adding and Evaluating Quality Metadata

AbstractThis article details the outcomes of the ‘National Learning and Teaching Resource Audit and Classification’ project, commissioned by the Australian Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT). The project used a range of methodologies to reorganise the OLT’s Resource Library (http://www.olt.gov.au/resource-library), constructing and selecting an optimal set of metadata elements, along with certain vocabularies for these elements, and then reindexing the content of the Resource Library utilising the new schema and vocabularies. This paper reports on a before-and-after evaluation of the Resource Library’s search performance through an information retrieval experiment based on searches logged by the repository’s content management system. It was found that the reindexing produced a significant increase in average recall from 25.1 to 37.1% and a significant increase in average precision from 37.6 to 50.4%. The paper also describes the construction of a new controlled vocabulary for the ‘resour...

On intermediaries' inquiring minds, elicitation styles, and user satisfaction

Building upon previous research on the concepts of inquiring minds and elicitation styles (Wu, 2005; Wu & Liu, 2003), this study aims to identify the relationships between the theoretical constructs of elicitation behavior and user satisfaction in terms of the relevance, utility, and satisfaction of search results, search interaction processes, and overall search activities. Descriptive statistical analysis is applied to compare the user satisfaction ratings with respect to the concepts of inquiring minds and elicitation styles. The results suggest that the stereotyped elicitation style received the lowest user satisfaction ratings compared with functionally and situationally oriented styles. It is suggested that the intermediaries take into account the characteristics of search questions and, accordingly, adapt their professional mindsets to search interview situations; that is, using an inquiring mind in the query formulation process as default mode with functional and situational styles of elicitations would be helpful for enhancing the users satisfaction ratings. Future research is suggested to better understand and to improve professional talk in information services.