Design and Evaluation of a Psychological Experiment on the Effectiveness of Document Summarisation for the Retrieval of Multilingual WWW Documents
Joanne Capstick, Gregor Erbach, Hans Uszkoreit · 1998
Since for the foreseeable future, retrieval will be an interactive task of the user looking through lists of potentially relevant documents, adequate support through various types of information is very important. A psychological experiment was conducted to examine the extent to which different types of automatically generated summaries aid retrieval and systematically evaluate user needs and behaviour in the area of crosslanguage retrieval for the WWW. Motivation The research described here was carried out in the MULINEX project (Erbach et al. 1997), the goal of which is to develop techniques for the effective retrieval of multilingual documents from the WWW. Special attention is given to presenting search results in such a way that users are supported in selecting documents that are relevant to their information needs. The presentation of search results includes: the language of the document; an automatically generated summary; a thematic classification; title; URL and document size...