Publication
Segment-level display time as implicit feedback: a comparison to eye tracking
Georg Buscher; Ludger van Elst; Andreas Dengel
In: SIGIR '09: Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. ACM SIGIR Conference on Information Retrieval (SIGIR-09), 32nd, July 19-23, Boston, MA, USA, Pages 67-74, ISBN 978-1-60558-483-6, ACM, 2009.
Abstract
We examine two basic sources for implicit relevance feed-
back on the segment level for search personalization: eye
tracking and display time. A controlled study has been conducted where 32 participants had to view documents in front
of an eye tracker, query a search engine, and give explicit
relevance ratings for the results. We examined the performance of the basic implicit feedback methods with respect
to improved ranking and compared their performance to a
pseudo relevance feedback baseline on the segment level and
the original ranking of a Web search engine.
Our results show that feedback based on display time
on the segment level is much coarser than feedback from
eye tracking. But surprisingly, for re-ranking and query
expansion it did work as well as eye-tracking-based feedback. All behavior-based methods performed significantly
better than our non-behavior-based baseline and especially
improved poor initial rankings of the Web search engine.
The study shows that segment-level display time yields
comparable results as eye-tracking-based feedback. Thus, it
should be considered in future personalization systems as an
inexpensive but precise method for implicit feedback.