A Comparison of Query and Term Suggestion Features for Interactive Searching

Query formulation is one of the most difficult and important aspects of information seeking and retrieval. Two techniques, term relevance feedback and query suggestion, provide methods to help users formulate queries, but each is limited in different ways. In this research we combine these two techniques by automatically creating query suggestions using term relevance feedback techniques. To evaluate our approach, we conducted an interactive information retrieval study with 55 subjects and 20 topics. Each subject completed four topics, half with a term suggestion system and half with a query suggestion system. We also investigated the source of the suggestions: approximately half of all subjects were provided with system-generated suggestions, while half were provided with user-generated suggestions. Results show that subjects used more query suggestions than term suggestions and saved more documents with these suggestions, even though there were no significant differences in performance. Subjects preferred the query suggestion system and rated it higher along a number of dimensions including its ability to help them think of new approaches to searching. Qualitative data provided insight into subjects' usage and ratings, and indicated that subjects often used the suggestions even when they did not click on them.