Mining the Behaviour of users in a Multilingual Information Access Task

This paper summarizes the participation of IIIT-H in the CLEF 2008 interactive task. Our goal was to mine the logs and extract conclusions about the behavior of users when facing a strictly multilingual information access task. We are provided the search logs which are generated by an online game, known-item image retrieval from Flickr. In this paper we describe the following tasks. We looked for the differences in the search behavior according to the language skills. We clustered the users based on the score of the user, precision of the user and the number of hints he asked for. We then studied the behavior of the most successful user cluster, the least successful (unsuccessful) user cluster and the users in between the above two. Our results show that, most of the users start with monolingual interface and soon they realize cross-lingual is interface is more useful than mono-lingual interface, and the users are more comfortable to search in their mother language or the languages that they know