Cooperation, Bookmarking, and Thesaurus in Interactive Bilingual Question Answering

The study presented involves several different contextual aspects and is the latest in a continuing series of exploratory experiments on information access behaviour in a multi-lingual context[1, 2]. This year’s interactive cross-lingual information access experiment was designed to measure three parameters we expected would affect the performance of users in cross-lingual tasks in languages in which the users are less than fluent. Firstly, introducing new technology, we measure the effect of topic-tailored term expansion on query formulation. Secondly, introducing a new component in the interactive interface, we investigate without measuring by using a control group the effect of a bookmark panel on user confidence in the reported result. Thirdly, we ran subjects pair-wise and allowed them to communicate verbally, to investigate how people may cooperate and collaborate with a partner during a search session performing a similar but non-identical search task.