Understanding search behavior is important and leads to more effective interfaces that support searchers throughout the search process. In this article, through an observational user study, we investigate the search behavior of 15 visually impaired and 15 sighted searchers while they complete complex search tasks online. We study complex search tasks because they are challenging, cognitively in...

In this paper we present and empirically evaluate a user study using a web search log and eye tracking to measure user behaviour during a query session, that is, a sequence of user queries, results page views and content page views, in order to find a specific piece of information. We evaluate different tasks, in terms of those who found the correct information, and in terms of the query sessio...

In this paper we present an interactive, object-based video retrieval system which features a novel query formulation method that is used to iteratively refine an underlying model of the search object. As the user continues query composition and browsing of retrieval results, the system’s object modeling process, based on Gaussian probability distributions, becomes incrementally more accurate, ...

The amount of biological information accessible via the internet is growing at a tremendous rate. The biologists often encounter problems in accessing huge amount of widely spread data due to disparate formats, remotely dispersed and varying implementation on different platforms and data models. Besides that, the custom browsing and querying mechanism implemented in different data sources requi...

For the TREC 2009, the team from University at Buffalo, the State University of New York participated in the Legal E-Discovery track, working on the interactive search task. We explored indexing and searching at both the record level and the document level with the Enron email collection. We studied the usefulness of fielded search and document presentation features such as clustering documents...

several semantic image search schemes have been recently proposed to retrieve images from the web. however, the query context is regularly ignored in these techniques and hence, many of the returned images are not adequately relevant. in this paper, we make use of context to further confine the outcome of the semantic search engines. for this purpose, we propose a hybrid search engine which uti...

Query expansion adds related words to a user query in order to improve retrieval results. It’s an important step in information retrieval. Most of current query expansion methods pay attention to specific expansion strategies or algorithms, while neglecting the query itself. In reaction to the phenomenon, a multistrategy query expansion method based on semantics was proposed. This method starte...

Despite its benefits and wide-spread acceptance, SQL [5] is not a perfect query language. Although graphical tools for query construction mask some of the complexity, complex database schema challenge even experienced database users during query formulation because a user is responsible for mapping the semantics of their query to the structure of the database. In this work, we propose a semanti...

Most database interfaces provide poor guidance on ad hoc query formulation, burdening users to learn, and to recall precisely the query language and the database. Kaleidoscope avoids this problem by guiding the user’s query construction actively. Based on a grammar specifying the syntax and semantics of an English-like Query Language (EnQL), the interface generates legitimate query constituents...