Micheline Beaulieu, Thien Do, Alex Payne, Susan Jones
Centre for Interactive Systems Research
Department of Information Science
City University
A Research Report Submitted to the British Library Research
and Development Department
May 1996
The system offered a range of possible strategies based on thesaural terms for reformulating queries. These could be initiated automatically by the system or interactively with the user. The formative phase of the evaluation established the appropriateness and usability of the interface as well as users' perceptions of the underlying functionality. The aim of the large scale field trial was to determine to what extent users would select thesaural terms suggested by the system to reformulate queries, and to evaluate the effectivess of a new dynamic form of query expansion implemented for this project.
The findings indicate that given the opportunity to interact, INSPEC users could build on the system's initiative and improve their search, but LBS users had less to work with at the outset and their own efforts to intervene appeared to be less fruitful then if they depended on the system. Overall the combined facility for both automatic and interactive query expansion provided by the ENQUIRE system was much more effective than an interactive version previously tested, and was also an improvement on the original Okapi fully automatic facility.
Acknowledgements
The Okapi team is grateful to the following for their help and support: