<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="N06-3010">
  <Title>Supporting Multiple Information-Seeking Strategies in a Single System Framework</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="247" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Traditional information retrieval (IR) systems ask people to specify queries using terms to select documents from the selected databases. Current research indicates some problems of such systems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> (1) Human information-seeking behavior is more complicated than just query formulation and term selection. For instance, people need to get an idea of which domain or genre of information they need, then familiarize themselves with the content and structure of various databases. They need to learn about a domain of interest and extend their knowledge of this domain so that they can formulate more effective queries. They need to change their searching and seeking strategies to improve their queries. (2) Human information-seeking behaviors are not discrete processes. These behaviors interact with one another during information-seeking processes (Belkin, 1996). (3) Interaction, not representation or comparison, is the central process of IR (Belkin, 1993). (4) Users with different goals need to use different information-seeking strategies (ISSs) to conduct searches. However, traditional IR systems only support one ISS, that is, formulating queries using terms to select documents from some databases (Belkin, 1993, 1995; Xie, 2000). (5) It is known that different ISSs can be optimally supported by different combinations of IR techniques (Oddy, 1977). The existing diversity of ISSs indicates that a system which provides good support for one ISS is unlikely to provide good support for the others.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> A system trying to support all ISSs with only one technique will be able to support them at only mediocre levels.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Therefore, the goal of the research is to design an interactive IR system which incorporates different IR techniques to adaptively support different ISSs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Specifically, our solution to these problems focuses mainly on the following two goals.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> (1) Constructing a single IR system in which support techniques are explicitly represented so that it is possible to shift from one combination of support techniques to another in real time, and appropriate support techniques are suggested to the user by the system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> (2) Evaluating the effectiveness and usability of the system within controlled experiments.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>