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Injecting realism into simulated work tasks: A case study of the book domain
Author(s) -
Borlund Pia,
Bogers Toine
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
proceedings of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.193
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 2373-9231
DOI - 10.1002/pra2.2018.14505501105
Subject(s) - popularity , relevance (law) , realism , computer science , context (archaeology) , domain (mathematical analysis) , data science , work (physics) , information retrieval , human–computer interaction , artificial intelligence , epistemology , psychology , engineering , social psychology , mathematics , mechanical engineering , paleontology , philosophy , mathematical analysis , political science , law , biology
Interactive IR studies are commonly conducted by assigning participants simulated work tasks situations (SWTS), predeter‐ mined textual descriptions of an information need and its context to motivate participants to perform realistic searches of the IR system in question. Despite their popularity, research has shown that formulating realistic and engaging SWTSs remains challenging. In this paper, we propose using the analyses of large samples of complex real‐world search requests—with the specific case of book search— to inject realism into SWTSs by taking different relevance aspects and their relative frequencies into account when formulating them. This should make it easier for researchers to design realistic SWTSs in the future.