Dr. Chirag Shah presented on distributed and collaborative aspects of information seeking. He discussed how community question answering sites like Yahoo Answers leverage the wisdom of crowds to quickly provide relevant answers at low cost compared to expert-based question answering. However, expert-based sites may provide higher quality, customized responses. Shah proposed hybrid models that link expert and community question answering or facilitate collaboration between experts. He also discussed systems for mediating collaboration between users during information seeking tasks.

1. Distributed Searching, United Searchers: 
Investigating Social and Collaborative Aspects of
Information Seeking
Dr. Chirag Shah
School of Communication & Information (SC&I)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
chirags@rutgers.edu
http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~chirags/
@chirag_shah

3. 
Information Seeking
Overview of the Talk

4. Information behavior
Retrieval
Searching
Answer
Seeking
Extraction
Filtering
Synthesis
Crawling
• Link
Information need Harvesting
• Summarize
Sense-making
• Perceive
• Recognize
• Gist
• Understand
• Interpret
• Analyze
• Evaluate

5. Information seeking
Interaction
Reference Query
interview
Question
Collaborative Information Seeking

6. Rest of the talk
 Community Q&A (CQA)
 Collaborative information seeking (CIS)

7. 
Community Q&A (CQA)
Crowdsourcing information seeking

8. Question to the crowd

9. Online Q&A

10. Online Q&A
Community Q&A
Social Q&A
Yahoo! Answers
Facebook
AnswerBag
Twitter
AskVille
Expert-based Q&A Collaborative Q&A
Google Answers WikiAnswers
Virtual reference Wikipedia Reference Desk

11. Yahoo! Answers

12. Seeking the wisdom of crowd

13. Seeking the wisdom of crowd

14. Our collections
Yahoo! Answers
Questions: 3 million+
Answers: 16 million+
Avg. answers per question: 5+
Users: 1 million+
Google Answers
Questions: 153,343
Answers: 56,835
Avg. answers per question: 0.37
Users: 83,454 + 534

15. Google Answers vs. Yahoo! Answers

16. Distributions of Users on Yahoo! Answers

17. Consumers and Contributors

18. Expert-based vs. Community Q&A
Expert User
1. Relevance 1. Speed
2. Accuracy 2. Relevance
3. Authenticity 3. Accuracy
4. Speed 4. Authenticity

19. Yahoo! Answers: Time for the First Answer

20. Yahoo! Answers: Time for the Best Answer

21. Expert-based vs. Community Q&A
EQA better than CQA CQA better than EQA
• Customization • Cost
• Quality • Volume
• Relevance • Speed
• Accuracy • Social aspects
• Authenticity • Engagement
• Completeness • Collaboration
• Process-focused • Product-focused

22. Creating synergic solutions for Q&A
Scenario-1: Collaboration among EQA services
Solution Challenges
• Integration of services
• Question routing
• Transparent/opaque?
EQA1
EQA2
EQA3

23. Creating synergic solutions for Q&A
Scenario-2: Linking EQA and CQA
Solution Challenges
• Evaluating content
• Personalization
• Service policies
EQA CQA

24. Challenges and opportunities
 Use the wisdom of the “wise” crowd
 Social search – making hyper-links to “hyper-connections”
 Connect Web search with online Q&A for a hybrid model of
information seeking

25. 
Collaborative Information Seeking
The Art and Science of Making Whole Greater than the Sum of All

26. Collaboration in information seeking
Requirement or setup
e.g., merger
Division of labor
e.g., class assignment
Diversity of skills
e.g., co-authorship

27. System mediated collaboration [SIGIR 2008]
Prospector Miner
Prospector – Explores promising Miner – Digs deeper looking
areas for mining spots for relevant information

28. System mediated collaboration
User 1 User 2
User
Interface
Regulator Input Output
(Roles) Coordinator Coordinator
Collaborative Algorithmic
Search Mediation Engine

29. System mediated collaboration

30. Prospector
Miner
R
E
S
U
L
T
S
Queries

31. Prospector
Miner

32. Prospector
Miner

33. Miner queue priority
Weighted Borda Count fusion
prioritydoc Bordadoc,q wseen,q wrel,q
q
wseen,q N seen,q / N unseen,q
wrel,q N rel,q / N nonrel,q

34. System-mediated asymmetric [IP&M 2010]
Gatherer Surveyor
Gatherer– Explores highly Surveyor – Digs further to
promising information (higher explore more diverse
relevance) information (higher novelty)

35. Adding a new dimension to information seeking
 Applications:
 Product search/shopping
 Health-related search
 Cross-disciplinary projects
 Location-based tasks
 Online gaming
Synergic solutions
[SIGIR 2011]

36. User mediated collaboration: Ariadne

37. User mediated collaboration: SearchTogether

38. User mediated collaboration: Coagmento

39. Challenges and opportunities
 Extending/replacing individual information seeking/retrieval
models with those incorporating collaboration
 Context-dependent analysis of costs and benefits of working in
collaboration
 Integration of collaborative tools into existing practices
 Converting social tie into collaborative tie and vice versa
 Evaluation

40. Shameless self-promotion!

41. Thank you!