Whether figuring out where to eat in an unfamiliar city or deciding which apartment to live in, reviews and forum posts are often a significant factor in online decision making. However, making sense of these rich repositories of diverse opinions can be prohibitively effortful, searchers need to sift through a large number of reviews to characterize each item based on aspects that they care about. We introduce a novel system, SearchLens, where searchers build up a collection of composable and reusable “Lenses” that reflect their different latent interests. Also, the Lenses allowed the system to generate personalized interfaces with visual explanations that promote transparency and enable in-depth exploration.

Abstract

Whether figuring out where to eat in an unfamiliar city or deciding which apartment to live in, consumer generated data (i.e. reviews and forum posts) are often an important influence in online decision making. To make sense of these rich repositories of diverse opinions, searchers need to sift through a large number of reviews to characterize each item based on aspects that they care about. We introduce a novel system, SearchLens, where searchers build up a collection of “Lenses” that reflect their different latent interests, and compose the Lenses to find relevant items across different contexts. Based on the Lenses, SearchLens generates personalized interfaces with visual explanations that promotes transparency and enables deeper exploration. While prior work found searchers may not wish to put in effort specifying their goals without immediate and sufficient benefits, results from a controlled lab study suggest that our approach incentivized participants to express their interests more richly than in a baseline condition, and a field study showed that participants found benefits in SearchLens while conducting their own tasks.

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SearchLens: Composing and Capturing Complex User Interests for Exploratory Search.
Joseph Chee Chang, Nathan Hahn, Adam Perer, Aniket Kittur.
In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM 24th Annual Meeting of the Intelligent User Interfaces: IUI 2019.

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@article{chang2019searchlens,
  title={SearchLens: Composing and Capturing Complex User Interests for Exploratory Search},
  author={Chang, Joseph Chee and Hahn, Nathan, and Perer, Adam and Kittur, Aniket},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 ACM 24th Annual Meeting of the Intelligent User Interfaces},
  series = {IUI'19},
  year={2019}
}