Paper Reading # 23

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Reference
Facilitating Exploratory Search by Model-Based Navigational Cues
Wai-Tat Fu, Thomas G. Kannampallil, and Ruogu Kang
IUI'10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China


Summary
This paper talks about social tagging and exploratory search. The simplest way to describe social tagging is associating labels or shortcuts to pieces of information to facilitate a search. Exploratory search is explained thoroughly in the paper and it is best described as ongoing search. Social tagging and exploratory search can generate navigational cues that facilitate knowledge exchange. The author's thesis states that different interaction methods will significantly impact the structuring, shaping, and behavior of human-computational systems. They claim that navigational cues create more intelligent interfaces. Social tags provide cues that facilitate information exploration as they help users predict content. These cues can help discover information in relevant topics. These methods focus in exploratory search and not in simple fact-retrieval searching. The main issue with navigational cues or creating tags for pieces of information is the vocabulary problem. This problem happens when different words are used to describe similar content, and as the number of tags increase they are incorrectly used to describe information. Even though this is an existing problem, authors have shown with their research that tags seem to converge over time and there is stability in tagging information. This could be explained by the fact that users seem to imitate how other users have created tags to keep the community consisted I would think.

Discussion
After reading multiple papers regarding research on navigational cues, I am starting to read very similar content. I have to say that I found this paper boring to some extent. The statistics in this paper completely lost me. One thing I read in a previous paper that could be very helpful to these researchers is the ability to create search communities which are created based on similar topic searching.