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Towards task-based personal information management evaluations

Published: 23 July 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Personal Information Management (PIM) is a rapidly growing area of research concerned with how people store, manage and refind information. A feature of PIM research is that many systems have been designed to assist users manage and refind information, but very few have been evaluated. This has been noted by several scholars and explained by the difficulties involved in performing PIM evaluations. The difficulties include that people re-find information from within unique personal collections; researchers know little about the tasks that cause people to re-find information; and numerous privacy issues concerning personal information. In this paper we aim to facilitate PIM evaluations by addressing each of these difficulties. In the first part, we present a diary study of information re-finding tasks. The study examines the kind of tasks that require users to refind information and produces a taxonomy of refinding tasks for email messages and web pages. In the second part, we propose a task-based evaluation methodology based on our findings and examine the feasibility of the approach using two different methods of task creation.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGIR '07: Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
    July 2007
    946 pages
    ISBN:9781595935977
    DOI:10.1145/1277741
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 23 July 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. personal information management
    2. user evaluation

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    SIGIR07: The 30th Annual International SIGIR Conference
    July 23 - 27, 2007
    Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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    • (2023)Enhancing Potential Re-Finding in Personalized Search With Hierarchical Memory NetworksIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2021.312606635:4(3846-3857)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
    • (2022)“What Can I Cook with these Ingredients?” - Understanding Cooking-Related Information Needs in Conversational SearchACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/349833040:4(1-32)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2022
    • (2022)Information Consumer eXperience: A Chilean Case StudySocial Computing and Social Media: Applications in Education and Commerce10.1007/978-3-031-05064-0_19(248-267)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2022
    • (2020)Enhancing Re-finding Behavior with External Memories for Personalized SearchProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3336191.3371794(789-797)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2020
    • (2019)Revisiting Online Personal Search Metrics with the User in MindProceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3331184.3331266(625-634)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2019
    • (2019)Stimulating Photo Curation on SmartphonesProceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3295750.3298947(255-259)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2019
    • (2019)Factors in Personal Information Management EvaluationAdvances in Visual Informatics10.1007/978-3-030-34032-2_46(523-536)Online publication date: 2019
    • (2019)Searching heterogeneous personal digital tracesProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.2256:1(276-285)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2019
    • (2018)Evaluation in Contextual Information RetrievalACM Computing Surveys10.1145/320494051:4(1-36)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2018
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