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Searching for the meaning of an unfamiliar sign-language word in a dictionary is difficult for learners, but emerging sign-recognition technology will soon enable users to search by submitting a video of themselves performing the word they recall. However, sign-recognition technology is imperfect, and users may need to search through a long list of possible results when seeking a desired result. To speed this search, we present a hybrid-search approach, in which users begin with a video-based query and then filter the search results by linguistic properties, e.g., handshape. We interviewed 32 ASL learners about their preferences for the content and appearance of the search-results page and filtering criteria. A between-subjects experiment with 20 ASL learners revealed that our hybrid search system outperformed a video-based search system along multiple satisfaction and performance metrics. Our findings provide guidance for designers of video-based sign-language dictionary search systems, with implications for other search scenarios.
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Patterns of Gender-Specializing Query Reformulation
Users of search systems often reformulate their queries by adding query terms to reflect their evolving information need or to more precisely express their information need when the system fails to surface relevant content. Analyzing these query reformulations can inform us about both system and user behavior. In this work, we study a special category of query reformulations that involve specifying demographic group attributes, such as gender, as part of the reformulated query (e.g., “olympic 2021 soccer results” → “olympic 2021 women‘s soccer results”). There are many ways a query, the search results, and a demographic attribute such as gender may relate, leading us to hypothesize different causes for these reformulation patterns, such as under-representation on the original result page or based on the linguistic theory of markedness. This paper reports on an observational study of gender-specializing query reformulations—their contexts and effects—as a lens on the relationship between system results and gender, based on large-scale search log data from Bing. We find that these reformulations sometimes correct for and other times reinforce gender representation on the original result page, but typically yield better access to the ultimately-selected results. The prevalence of these reformulations—and which gender they skew towards—differ by topical context. However, we do not find evidence that either group under-representation or markedness alone adequately explains these reformulations. We hope that future research will use such reformulations as a probe for deeper investigation into gender (and other demographic) representation on the search result page.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1751278
- PAR ID:
- 10423689
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’23)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
