Affective utterances as contextual feedback in interactive information retrieval: examples from help-seeking interactions

We report early results of our investigation of help-seeking behaviors during interactive information retrieval, with specific attention to one aspect of context, affective utterances made by searchers during the process of completing an assigned search task Searchers' utterances were coded as positive and negative assessments of the results of using automatic Help functionalities in two digital libraries. Although preliminary at this time, data presented in this paper indicate that affective utterances can be mapped to specific help-seeking events and therefore can be construed as important aspects of contextual feedback, worthy of further exploration.