Paper reading #34: Facilitating Exploratory Search by Model-Based Navigational Cues"

 

Facilitating Exploratory Search by Model-Based Navigational Cues
Wai-Tat Fu, Thomas G. Kannampallil, and Ruogu Kan
University of Illinois
Presented at IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China

 

Summary

In this paper, the authors talk about building a simulator to test the notion that unstructured social tagging may cause difficulties for searchers. The hypothesis is based on the notion that casual tagging will eventually become an incoherent mess of tags. The counter hypothesis is that tagging isn't as random as thought, and will instead follow cohesively from whichever tags are posted earliest. That is, early tagging heavily influences the tagging of later users.

The Semantic Imitation Model was designed to simulate the actions of expert and novice users across a document space assembled for the study. The results of the simulation did seem to indicate that convergence is experienced.

 

Discussion

I really don't understand some of the simulations. I would have preferred a user study. I think that would have helped the authors better illustrates some of the arguments put forward.