Bridging in-task emotional responses with post-task evaluations in digital library search interface user studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interactive information retrieval (IIR) interfaces are commonly evaluated using questionnaires that collect post-task subjective measures such as satisfaction, ease of use, usefulness, and user engagement. Although the importance of measuring emotional responses during the search process has been recognized, incorporating this aspect into IIR user studies has been challenging. We have developed a novel method to capture real-time emotional responses based on advances in facial emotion classification approaches. We utilize consumer-grade front-facing cameras to collect emotional responses, which synchronize with the user’s interactions with the search interface. In a controlled laboratory study, the relevance of search results was manipulated to validate the approach’s effectiveness and explore how search results’ relevance impacts users’ emotional responses, post-task evaluations of the search interface, and interactions with search interface features. This enabled us to examine whether we could detect emotional responses, whether recency effects were observed in post-task evaluations, and whether feature use correlated with emotional responses. The study was conducted in the context of exploratory search within an academic digital library. The results of this study demonstrate that both positive and negative emotional responses can be reliably detected during the search process. There is evidence of recency effects in post-task measures, and the study identifies specific interactive features used during the experience of positive and negative emotional responses. This serves as a foundation for the use of emotional responses to supplement post-task survey data when evaluating search interfaces. • Real-time emotion detection in IIR interfaces. • Recency effects observed in post-task subjective measures. • Correlation between emotional responses and post-task evaluations. • Emotional responses variation across search interface features. • Emotions in exploratory search within academic digital libraries.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".