Does More Context Help? Effects of Context Window and Application Source on Retrieval Performance

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskriftTidsskriftartikelForskningfagfællebedømt

We study the effect of contextual information obtained from a user's digital trace on Web search performance. Contextual information is modeled using Dirichlet-Hawkes processes (DHP) and used in augmenting Web search queries. The context is captured by monitoring all naturally occurring user behavior using continuous 24/7 recordings of the screen and associating the context with the queries issued by the users. We report a field study in which 13 participants installed a screen recording and digital activity monitoring system on their laptops for 14 days, resulting in data on all Web search queries and the associated context data. A query augmentation (QAug) model was built to expand the original query with semantically related terms. The effects of context window and source were determined by training context models with temporally varying context windows and varying application sources. The context models were then utilized to re-rank the QAug model. We evaluate the context models by using the Web document rankings of the original query as a control condition compared against various experimental conditions: (1) a search context condition in which the context was sourced from search history; (2) a non-search context condition in which the context was sourced from all interactions excluding search history; (3) a comprehensive context condition in which the context was sourced from both search and non-search histories; and (4) an application-specific condition in which the context was sourced from interaction histories captured on a specific application type. Our results indicated that incorporating more contextual information significantly improved Web search rankings as measured by the positions of the documents on which users clicked in the search result pages. The effects and importance of different context windows and application sources, along with different query types are analyzed, and their impact on Web search performance is discussed.

OriginalsprogEngelsk
Artikelnummer39
TidsskriftACM Transactions on Information Systems
Vol/bind40
Udgave nummer2
Sider (fra-til)1-40
ISSN1046-8188
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2022

Bibliografisk note

Funding Information:
This research was funded by the project COADAPT (Human and Work Station Adaptation Support to aging citizens, grant agreement No. 826266) and the project PON AIM (id: AIM1875400-1, CUP: B74I18000210006), and was partially supported by the Academy of Finland (Flagship programme: Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI and decision numbers: 322653, 328875, 336085). Authors’ addresses: T. Vuong and G. Jacucci, University of Helsinki, Pietari Kalmin katu 5 00560 Helsinki, Finland; emails: vuong@cs.helsinki.fi, giulio.jacucci@helsinki.fi; S. Andolina, University of Palermo, Via Archirafi 34 90123 Palermo, Italy, University of Helsinki, Pietari Kalmin katu 5 00560 Helsinki, Finland; email: salvatore.andolina@unipa.it; T. Ruotsalo, University of Helsinki, Pietari Kalmin katu 5 00560 Helsinki, Finland, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 1 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark; email: tuukka.ruotsalo@helsinki.fi. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery. 1046-8188/2021/09-ART39 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3474055

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

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