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Tag-based information access in image collections: insights from log and eye-gaze analyses

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Abstract

Tag clouds have been utilized as a “social” way to find and visualize information, providing both one-click access and a snapshot of the “aboutness” of a tagged collection. While many research projects have explored and compared various tag artifacts using information theory and simulations, fewer studies have been conducted to compare the effectiveness of different tag-based browsing interfaces from the user’s point of view. This research aims to investigate how users utilize tags in image search context and to what extent different organizations of tag browsing interfaces are useful for image search. We conducted two experiments to explore user behavior and performance with three interfaces: two tag-enabled interfaces (the regular and faceted tag-clouds) and a baseline (search-only) interface. Our results demonstrate the value of tags in the image search context, the role of tags in the exploratory search, and the strengths of two kinds of tag organization explored in this paper.

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Notes

  1. We logged users’ actions during the search process including the query they issued, and all the other interactions they made such as “Add tag”, “Remove Tag”, etc. as presented in Table 5.

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Funding

Funding was provided by National Science Foundation (Grant No. DUE #0840597) and Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (Grant No. MOST 107-2410-H-004-098-MY3).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Information Systems, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Yi-Ling Lin

  2. Computer Science Department, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Denis Parra

  3. Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Christoph Trattner

  4. School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA

    Peter Brusilovsky

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  1. Yi-Ling Lin
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  4. Peter Brusilovsky
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Correspondence to Yi-Ling Lin.

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Lin, YL., Parra, D., Trattner, C. et al. Tag-based information access in image collections: insights from log and eye-gaze analyses. Knowl Inf Syst 61, 1715–1742 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-019-01343-4

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