Promoting user engagement and learning in search tasks by effective document representation

Much research in information retrieval (IR) focuses on optimisation of the rank of relevant retrieval results for single shot ad hoc IR tasks. Relatively little research has been carried out on supporting and promoting user engagement within search tasks. We seek to improve user experience by use of enhanced document snippets to be presented during the search process to promote user engagement with retrieved information. The primary role of document snippets within search has traditionally been to indicate the potential relevance of retrieved items to the user’s information need. Beyond the relevance of an item, it is generally not possible to infer the contents of individual ranked results just by reading the current snippets. We hypothesise that the creation of richer document snippets and summaries, and effective presentation of this information to users will promote effective search and greater user engagement, and support emerging areas such as learning through search. We generate document summaries for a given query by extracting top relevant sentences from retrieved documents. Creation of these summaries goes beyond exist- ing snippet creation methods by comparing content between documents to take into account novelty when selecting content for inclusion in individual document sum- maries. Further, we investigate the readability of the generated summaries with the overall goal of generating snippets which not only help a user to identify document relevance, but are also designed to increase the user’s understanding and knowledge of a topic gained while inspecting the snippets. We perform a task-based user study to record the user’s interactions, search be- haviour and feedback to evaluate the effectiveness of our snippets using qualitative and quantitative measures. In our user study, we found that richer snippets generated in this work improved the user experience and topical knowledge, and helped users to learn about the topic effectively