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Using Twitter to Assess Information Needs: Early Results

Wilson, M. L. (2009) Using Twitter to Assess Information Needs: Early Results. In: HCIR'09, 23rd October 2009, Washington DC. pp. 109-112.

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Abstract

Information needs tell us why search terms are used, helping to disambiguate, for example, what exactly people are looking for with queries such as ‘Orange’ or ‘Java’. It is hard to understand goals and motivations, however, from the keywords entered into search engines alone. This paper discusses the pilot analysis of 180,000 tweets, containing search-related terms, to try and understand how people describe their own needs and goals. The early analysis shows that some terms academically associated with searching behaviours were infrequently used by twitter users, and that the use of terminology varied depending on the subject of search. The results also show that specific topics of searching tasks can be identified directly within tweets. Future analysis of the still on-going 5-month study will constitute more formal text analytical methods and try to build a corpus of real search tasks.

Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item
Creator/Authors:
Max L. Wilson
Research Group:Old ECS Groups > Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia
Date:October 2009
Information about this record:
Performance Indicator:EZ~01~00~04
Citations:Google Scholar: 2
Downloads (2010):168
ID Code:17952
Last Modified:23 Sep 2011 10:38
Deposited On:24 Sep 2009 14:30 by Wilson, Max

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References in Article

Select the SEEK icon to attempt to find the referenced article. If it does not appear to be in this archive you will be forwarded to the paracite service. Poorly formated references will probably not work.

[1] Broder, A. A taxonomy of web search. ACM SIGIR Forum, 36, 2 (2002). 3-10.

[2] Byström, K. and Hansen, P. Work tasks as units for analysis in information seeking and retrieval studies. in Bruce, H., Fidel, R., Ingwersen, P. and Vakkari, P. eds. Emerging Frameworks and Methods, Libraries Unlimited, Greenwood Village, CO, 2002, 239-251.

[3] Harman, D.K. The TREC conferences. (1997). 247-256.

[4] Jansen, B.J. and Spink, A. How are we searching the World Wide Web?: A comparison of nine search engine transaction logs. 42, 1 (2006). 248- 263.

[5] Järvelin, K. and Ingwersen, P. Information seeking research needs extension towards tasks and technology. 10, 1 (2004). 10-11.

[6] Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T. and Tseng, B., Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. in KDD'07, (2007), ACM New York, NY, USA, 56-65.

[7] Kelly, R. Twitter Study - August 2009, Pear Analytics, 2009, 1-13.

[8] Kim, E., Gilbert, S., Edwards, M.J. and Graeff, E. Detecting Sadness in 140 Characters: Sentiment Analysis of Mourning Michael Jackson on Twitter, Web Ecology Project, Boston, MA, USA, 2009, 1- 15.

[9] Kules, B. and Capra, R., Creating exploratory tasks for a faceted search interface. in HCIR'08, (2008).

[10] Lee, U., Liu, Z. and Cho, J., Automatic identification of user goals in web search. in WWW'05, (2005), ACM New York, NY, USA, 391-400.

[11] Marchionini, G. Exploratory search: from finding to understanding. Commun. ACM, 49, 4 (2006). 41-46.

[12] Pirolli, P. and Card, S., Information foraging in information access environments. in CHI'95, (1995), ACM Press, 51-58.

[13] Rose, D. and Levinson, D., Understanding user goals in web search. in WWW'04, (2004), ACM New York, NY, USA, 13-19.

[14] Viegas, F., et al. Manyeyes: a site for visualization at internet scale. IEEE Trans. Visualization and Computer Graphics, 13, 6 (2007). 1121-1128.

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