Building and Using Models of Information Seeking, Search and Retrieval Full Day Tutorial

Understanding how people interact with information sys-tems when searching is central to the study of Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR). While much of the prior work in this area has either been conceptual, observational or em-pirical, recently there has been renewed interest in develop-ing mathematical models of information seeking and search. This is because such models can provide a concise and com-pact representation of search behaviours and naturally gen-erate testable hypotheses about search behaviour. This full day tutorial focuses on explaining and building formal models of Information Seeking and Retrieval. The tutorial is structured into four sessions. In the first ses-sion we will discuss the rationale of modelling and examine a number of early formal models of search (including early cost models and the Probability Ranking Principle). Then we will examine more contemporary formal models (includ-ing Information Foraging Theory, the Interactive Probability Ranking Principle, and Search Economic Theory). The fo-cus will be on the insights and intuitions that we can glean from the math behind these models. The latter sessions will be dedicated to building models that optimise particular ob-jectives which drive how users make decisions, along with a how-to guide on model building, where we will describe dif-ferent techniques (including analytical, graphical and com-putational) that can be used to generate hypotheses from such models. In the final session, participants will be chal-lenged to develop a simple model of interaction applying the techniques learnt during the day, before concluding with an overview of challenges and future directions. This tutorial is aimed at participants wanting to know more about the various formal models of information seek-ing, search and retrieval, that have been proposed in the literature. The tutorial will be presented at an introductory level, and is designed to support participants who want to be able to understand and apply such models, as well as to build their own models