Evaluating the effectiveness of a collaborative querying environment

• Main Authors: Fu, Lin, Goh, Dion Hoe-Lian, Foo, Schubert
• Other Authors: Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information storage and retrieval
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/94444; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/6123
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Collaborative querying seeks to help users formulate queries by sharing expert knowledge or other users’ search experiences. In previous work, a collaborative query environment (CQE) was developed for a digital library. The system operates by clustering and recommending related queries to users using a hybrid query similarity identification approach. Users can explore the query clusters using a graph-based visualization system known as the Query Graph Visualizer (QGV). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the CQE with goal of informing the usefulness and usability of such a system. Our results show that compared with traditional information retrieval systems, collaborative querying can lead to faster information seeking when users perform unspecified tasks.