Analyzing Effect of Roles on Search Performance and Query Formulation in Collaborative Search

Abstract

We investigate how explicit search roles assigned to group members affect their search performance and behavior in collaborative information seeking (CIS). Although several roles have been proposed in CIS, how these roles affect the search performances and behaviors of the members has not yet been explored. We focus on the existing Gatherer and Surveyor roles and analyze their effects on search performances and query formulation behaviors. The goal of our study is to understand the relationships between the roles and search behaviors and get insights into developing algorithms such as query suggestions or document rankings adaptive to the roles and behaviors. We conducted a user study with 20 participants in 10 pairs, where each pair of Gatherer and Surveyor were asked to perform a recall-oriented collaborative search task. We first analyzed the search performance of the two roles in terms of recall and diversity. We also analyzed how their queries were affected by their preceding queries or webpages that were visited through a questionnaire and log analysis. Finally, we discussed what algorithms would be required to support role-based CIS.