Gabriella
Kazi, Andrew Trotman
The widespread use
of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) on the Web and in digital libraries has
led to a drastic increase in the number of XML Information Retrieval (IR)
systems being developed. XML IR approaches exploit the logical structure of
documents for their querying, retrieval and presentation to the user. Despite
their abundance, there remains uncertainty regarding the advantages that
structural information may bring to IR. In this paper we report on a user study
exploring questions around the potential benefits of structure to users, such
as: Is structural information useful when searching for relevant information?
Can the structure of a document help to locate relevant information when
browsing inside a document? Does the role of structural information depend on
the length of a document? Our investigation was conducted as part of the INEX 2006
interactive track experiment, which we supplemented with questionnaires. Our
qualitative analysis of the data collected from seven participants aims to
identify how users will interact with XML IR systems. We do this by drawing
parallels with paper based information searching, Web searching, and digital
library searching. What we find is that XML IR users are unlike Web users –
they use advanced search facilities, they prefer a list of results supplement
with branch points into the document, and they need better methods of
navigation within long documents.