ASIS&T
2013 Annual Meeting
Montréal, Québec, Canada | November
1-5, 2013
Zhen Yue, University of Pittsburgh
Shuguang Han, University of Pittsburgh
Daqing He, University of Pittsburgh
Tuesday, 10:30am
Collaboration in information seeking and retrieval environment is common particularly when the search task is complex and exploratory. Multiple factors such as contextual feature and task type can affect users’ query behavior. This paper presents a study investigating the effects of collaboration and task on users’ query behavior. The study involves two conditions: collaborative search and individual search, and two search tasks: recall-oriented information-gathering task and utility based decision-making task. We analyze users’ query behavior in three dimensions: basic query features, query reformulation and query performance. The findings of this study reveal that queries are more diverse in collaborative search and recall-oriented task. Users employed New and Specialization more often as query reformulation types in collaborative search while people in individual search use Reconstruction more often. The successful query rate is higher in individual search and recall-oriented task.