The 5 Ws of Collaborative Search Jaime Teevan

The 5 W’s of Collaborative Search Jaime Teevan and Merrie Morris Microsoft Research

Who, What, Where, When & Why? • • • Who does collaborative searches? What are collaborative search tasks? Where are the collaborators located? When does the collaboration occur? Why do people collaborate? Understand Frame • How can we support collaborative search?

Who Does Collaborative Searches? • Everyone! – More than 50% report collaborating for search – People rely on others even for individual search • Consider type of relationship • Privacy considerations – Friends v. strangers – Kids v. adults

What Are Collaborative Search Tasks? • Tend to be involved tasks (v. directed search) • Some popular tasks: – Travel planning – Shopping – Technical information/literature • Important: Important task be related to group – Work groups get benefit for work tasks – Social groups get benefit for social tasks

Where Are the Collaborators Located? • Co-located – Ability to share control – Ability to partition task: Smart Splitting • Remote – Awareness of others important Type 2 Diabetes Complications - American Diabetes Association Many of the complications of diabetes are strongly related to high blood sugar levels. It is believed that keeping your blood sugar levels in your target range is your best defense. . . www. diabetes. org/type-2 -diabetes/complications. jsp

When Does the Collaboration Occur? • Synchronous – Communication important – Support different roles • Asynchronous – Need to preserve and expose state – Hard to identify future value of information – Can “collaborate” with future self

Why Do People Collaborate? • Group longevity – Task-based – Trait-based Explicit Implicit – Explicit – Implicit Identification • Group identification Task Friends Age Gender Job team Job role Location Relevance judgments Query selection Task-based Interest group Longevity Trait-based

How Can We Support Collaboration? • Group identification – Match people into groups – Match task to appropriate group • Algorithmic support for collaborative search – Identify documents of interest to group – Partition information appropriately to members – Summarize documents based on group interests

How Can We Support Collaboration? • Build a common evaluation framework – An example framework • Individual profiles • Grouping information • Relevance judgments for common queries – We have used the framework to study • Groupization • Smart splitting • Group hit highlighting

Thank you. Jaime Teevan http: //research. microsoft. com/~teevan Collaborative Search M. R. Morris and Teevan, J. Collaborative Search: Designing for a Spectrum of Collaborative Styles. (Ed. G. Marchionini. ) Morgan-Claypool 2009. Groupization Teevan, J. , M. R. Morris and S. Bush. Discovering and Using Groups to Improve Personalized Search. WSDM 2009. Exploring Solutions Morris, M. R. , J. Teevan and S. Bush. Enhancing Collaborative Web Search with Personalization: Groupization, Smart Splitting, and Group Hit. Highlighting. CSCW 2008. Group Types Morris, M. R. and J. Teevan. Understanding Groups' Properties as a Means of Improving Collaborative Search Systems. JCDL Workshop on Collaborative Information Retrieval 2008.