FOA Home
Figure (figure) focuses on a single instance of \RelFbk, shown
as a labeling over the set of \Ret documents. But beyond any one
reaction to a single retrieved set product, a central premise
of the FOA process is that users' reactions to just-retrieved
documents provides the pivotal link many such assesments into the FOA
search dialog. This is perhaps most clear in Figure (figure) ,
where RelFbk is used to link a series of reactions into a QUERY
SESSION .
Attempts to support this searching process, and then
attempts to rigorously evaluate how well software sytems support
browsing users as they FOA is one of the most vexing issues within IR
evaluation. [Daniels85] [Saracevic88] [Larson91] [REF1045] [ODay93] [Cawsey92] [Russel93] [Koenemann96] . Part of the problem
is the misconception that, if a search engine works perfectly, and the
user issues the perfect MAGIC BULLET QUERY , out will spill all
and only relevant documents! Such simplistic definitions of optimality
come naturally to computer scientists; library scientists who are used
to the naturalistic behaviors of real patrons in their libraries know
that a much more extended and nebulous form of support is required.
Marcia
Bates' famous BERRY PICKING metaphor [REF839] [Bates89] is useful here. [a] query is
not satisfied by a single final retrieved set, but by a series of
selections of individiual references and bits of information at each
stage of the ever-modifying search A bit-at-a-time retrieval of this
sort is here called beryypicking. This term is used by analogy to
picking huckleberries or blueberries in the forest. The berries are
scattered on the bushes; they do not come in bunches. One must pick them
one at a time. One could do berry-picking of information without the
search need itself changing (evolving) but ... [we] consider searches
that combine both of these characteristics. [Bates89]
In addition to highlighting the
same iterative, browsing behavior central to FOA's characterization of
the dialog, the ``evolving'' character of the information need in Bates'
metaphor is also important. Imagine that you are in the forest on an
idyllic day with only one purpose: fill your bucket with the best
blueberries you can find. Early in the day, with your whole afternoon in
front of you, you are likely to be very choosy. At this juncture, you
could bump into a bush full of blueberries that were not as ripe nor as
large as you imagine must exist somewhere else in the forest,
and not drop a single one into your basket. But late in the afternoon,
if you have had poor luck and little to show for your efforts, you could
come across an even worse bush and grab every single berry, shriveled or
not!
Applying this metaphor to FOA is provacative in many respects. For
example, it suggests that maintaining an explicit representation of the
retrieved document ``basket'' might be a useful addition to any search
engine interface. It predicts a time course to the distribution of
users' RelFbk assessments. For now, we simply observe that it seems
quite likely that an assessment of one document's relevance will depend
greatly on the ``basket'' of other documents we already have seen. The
general idea of thinking of an ``evolutionary ecology of information
foraging'' [Pirolli97] has become
less metaphoric and more concrete as information search agents (like the
InfoSpiders described in §7.6 ) explore
the ``environment'' of the WWW.
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Extending the dialog with \RelFbk
Subsections