Query expansion behavior within a thesaurus‐enhanced search environment: A user‐centered evaluation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The study reported here investigated the query expansion behavior of end‐users interacting with a thesaurus‐enhanced search system on the Web. Two groups, namely academic staff and postgraduate students, were recruited into this study. Data were collected from 90 searches performed by 30 users using the OVID interface to the CAB abstracts database. Data‐gathering techniques included questionnaires, screen capturing software, and interviews. The results presented here relate to issues of search‐topic and search‐term characteristics, number and types of expanded queries, usefulness of thesaurus terms, and behavioral differences between academic staff and postgraduate students in their interaction. The key conclusions drawn were that (a) academic staff chose more narrow and synonymous terms than did postgraduate students, who generally selected broader and related terms; (b) topic complexity affected users' interaction with the thesaurus in that complex topics required more query expansion and search term selection; (c) users' prior topic‐search experience appeared to have a significant effect on their selection and evaluation of thesaurus terms; (d) in 50% of the searches where additional terms were suggested from the thesaurus, users stated that they had not been aware of the terms at the beginning of the search; this observation was particularly noticeable in the case of postgraduate students.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".