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There has been little research on task complexity and difficulty in music information retrieval (MIR), whereas many studies in the text retrieval domain have found that task complexity and difficulty have significant effects on user effectiveness. This study aimed to bridge the gap by exploring i) the relationship between task complexity and difficulty; ii) factors affecting task difficulty; and iii) the relationship between task difficulty, task complexity, and user search behaviors in MIR. An empirical user experiment was conducted with 51 participants and a novel MIR system. The participants searched for 6 topics across 3 complexity levels. The results revealed that i) perceived task difficulty in music search is influenced by task complexity, user background, system affordances, and task uncertainty and enjoyability; and ii) perceived task difficulty in MIR is significantly correlated with effectiveness metrics such as the number of songs found, number of clicks, and task completion time. The findings have implications for the design of music search tasks (in research) or use cases (in system development) as well as future MIR systems that can detect task difficulty based on user effectiveness metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for full-fledged information retrieval services via the World Wide Web has grown as the Internet has evolved. However, existing information retrieval systems for the World Wide Web have various limitations in the search functions, and in structure and scale of databases. The information retrieval system described in this paper has been operating for a real information retrieval service, providing high-level search functions via a command line and a Web interface for large-scale scholarly databases in text form with complex structures. In this paper, the authors first describe an outline of and the design of the information retrieval functions, in particular the characteristic functions including set operations, thesaurus searches, hierarchical structure searches, and unified searches of multiple databases. Next, they describe the implementation technologies of the system focusing on the features of the search engine, the session control method, the handling of large-scale databases, and the structure of servers and processes. Then, the authors evaluate the current system based on the real operation, and finally discuss the future issues and the related researches. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 34(6): 44–58, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10015 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. This paper reports on a method for closely observing, eliciting and visualizing exploratory search processes with embedded information encountering in context. Method. Exploratory Web search processes of sixteen participants for report task and trip task with thinking aloud in Japanese were captured in video, together with their eye-movements. In post-search interviews, participants' thoughts, feelings and intentions for particular actions at each point of the Web search processes were elicited while showing video-recorded search processes with and without eye-movement. Analysis. Think-aloud and interview data were recorded together with the type of pages viewed, twenty-two eye-gaze points on search results pages, ten search-related actions and the link depth into the annotation tool using time-stamps for sequencing. A qualitative content analysis of the integrated datasets identified thirty instances of information encountering. Results. Information encountering sometimes led to a temporary deviation from the initial task, but may have resulted in a change of the topic of the paper and/or destination of the trip. Conclusions. Results lead to a reconsideration of the definition of information encountering, which may include learning by searching. Showing eye-movement data during the post-search interviews helped participants recall their thoughts at each moment during the search, including information encountering in the context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]