Investigations of Computer-Aided Document Search Strategies

摘要

Controlled experiments have been conducted with the enhanced experimental intermediary system CONIT (COnnector for Networked Information Transfer) to test how effective such a system could be in assisting end users in searching compared with human expert intermediary search specialists. Some 16 end users, none of whom had previously operated either CONIT or any of the 4 connected retrieval systems, performed searches on 20 different topics using CONIT with no assistance other than that provided by CONIT itself (except to recover from computer/software bugs). These same users also performed searches on the same topics with the help of human expert intermediaries. Also discussed in this report are details of the enhanced CONIT system and its costs. In addition, there are discussions of the possibilities for even more advanced intermediary systems, including those which perform automatic database selection and simulate human experts.