2010
Authors
Teixeira Lopes, C; Ribeiro, C;
Publication
IIiX 2010 - Proceedings of the 2010 Information Interaction in Context Symposium
Abstract
It is recognized by the Information Retrieval community that context affects the retrieval process. Query formulation and relevance assessment are stages where the user role is central. The first determines what the system will search for and the second is frequently used to evaluate how the system behaved. With a large human involvement, these stages are expected to be largely influenced by user and task characteristics. To analyze the influence of these context features on the specified stages of health information retrieval, we conducted a user study in which we collected user features through two questionnaires. User characteristics include features like age, gender, web search experience, health search experience and familiarity with the medical topic. Task features include the medical specialty, the question type, the task's clarity and the task's easiness. Besides user and task features, the relevance assessment analysis also covered features related to the query and document. We found many variables do indeed affect query formulation and relevance judgment. Some of our results question evaluations using test collections and ask for evaluation models that incorporate other kind of success measures. Copyright 2010 ACM.
2010
Authors
Lopes, CT; Ribeiro, C;
Publication
SIGIR 2010: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 33RD ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL ACM SIGIR CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
Abstract
We have conducted a user study to evaluate several generalist and health-specific search engines on health information retrieval. Users evaluated the relevance of the top 30 documents of 4 search engines in two different health information needs. We introduce the concepts of local and global precision and analyze how they affect the evaluation. Results show that Google surpasses the precision of all other engines, including the health-specific ones, and that precision differs with the type of clinical question and its medical specialty.
2011
Authors
Lopes, CT; Ribeiro, C;
Publication
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Abstract
The Web is being increasingly used by health consumers to search for health information. In this domain, the quality of the retrieved contents is crucial to avoid healthcare hazards. To address this problem and help the user identify reliable and credible contents, initiatives have appeared that certify the compliance of health websites to quality standards. In this work we explore the impact of medical certification on several aspects of health information retrieval performance. Moreover, we analyze the usefulness of certification categories to the personalization of the search experience. Our findings suggest that medical certification might be incorporated as a ranking criterion. We conclude that the medical accuracy of the resulting knowledge is enhanced by the use of certified information and depends on the users' comprehension of the document. In general, we also conclude that there is space for personalization in search by health consumers. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin.
2006
Authors
Lopes, CT; David, G;
Publication
COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE AND ITS APPLICATIONS - ICCSA 2006, PT 4
Abstract
Usage analysis of a Web Information System is a valuable help to predict user needs, to assess system's impact and to guide to its improvement. This is usually done analysing clickstreams, a low-level approach, with huge amounts of data that calls for data warehouse techniques. This paper presents a dimensional model to monitor user behaviour in Higher Education Web Information Systems and an architecture for the extraction, transformation and load process. These have been applied in the development of a data warehouse to monitor the use of SIGARRA, the University of Porto's Higher Education Web Information System. The efficiency and effectiveness of this monitorization method were confirmed by the knowledge extracted from a 3 month period analysis. A brief description of the main results and recommendations are also described.
2023
Authors
Rodrigues J.; Lopes C.T.;
Publication
Open Information Science
Abstract
Research data management is essential for safeguarding and prospecting data generated in a scientific context. Specific issues arise regarding data in image format, as this data typology poses particular challenges and opportunities; however, not much attention has been given to data as images. We reviewed 109 articles from several research domains where images were used either as data or metadata to understand how researchers specifically deal with this data format, and what are your habits and behaviors. We use the Web of Science (WoS), considering its five main areas of research. We included in the initial corpus the most relevant articles by research domain, selecting the ten most cited articles in WoS, by year, between 2010 and 2021. The selected articles should be in English and in open access. The results found that images have been used in scientific works numerous times, but, unfortunately, few are those in which they are the central element of the study. Photography is the type of image most used in most domains. In terms of the instruments used, the Technology and Life Sciences and Biomedicine domains use the microscope more, while the Arts and Humanities and Physical Sciences domains use the camera more. We found that the images are mostly produced in the context of the project, rather than reused by third parties. As for their collection scenario, these are mostly produced/used in a laboratory context. The overwhelming majority of the images present in the articles are digital, and only a small part is analog. We verify that Arts and Humanities are more likely to perform qualitative types of analyses, while Life Sciences and Biomedicine overwhelmingly use quantitative analyses. As for the issues of sharing and depositing, Life Sciences and Biomedicine is the domain that stands out the most in the tasks of depositing and sharing images. It was found that the licenses of a project are intrinsically related to the motivations for sharing results with third parties. Description, a fundamental step in the data management process, is neglected by a large number of researchers. The images are mostly not described or annotated and when this happens, researchers don't provide much detail about this.
2023
Authors
Oliveira, B; Lopes, CT;
Publication
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2023, Austin, TX, USA, March 19-23, 2023
Abstract
Web search engines have marked everyone's life by transforming how one searches and accesses information. Search engines give special attention to the user interface, especially search engine result pages (SERP). The well-known "10 blue links"list has evolved into richer interfaces, often personalized to the search query, the user, and other aspects. More than 20 years later, the literature has not adequately portrayed this development. We present a study on the evolution of SERP interfaces during the last two decades using Google Search as a case study. We used the most searched queries by year to extract a sample of SERP from the Internet Archive. Using this dataset, we analyzed how SERP evolved in content, layout, design (e.g., color scheme, text styling, graphics), navigation, and file size. We have also analyzed the user interface design patterns associated with SERP elements. We found that SERP are becoming more diverse in terms of elements, aggregating content from different verticals and including more features that provide direct answers. This systematic analysis portrays evolution trends in search engine user interfaces and, more generally, web design. We expect this work will trigger other, more specific studies that can take advantage of our dataset.
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