User Interactions with Search Systems

The proposed course on User Interactions with Search Systems provides students an overview on interactive information retrieval (IIR) evaluation studies that is specifically focused on the modelling of users, tasks and contexts, and methods for IIR studies. This thread of research has attracted more information retrieval (IR) researchers in recent years, as evidenced by the establishment of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval series (CHIIR). Given recent interests in machine learning, social media data analysis and emerging system-oriented interactive search models, this course provides students with a more complete picture for understanding user search behaviour and user-oriented approaches for the evaluation of IR systems. It emphasises how user aspects should be addressed from theoretical, conceptual, design and evaluation perspectives for IR theory and system development. This important research area has been rarely taught at the International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR).