Related papers: Foraging patterns in online searches
The foraging behavior of animals is a paradigm of target search in nature. Understanding which foraging strategies are optimal and how animals learn them are central challenges in modeling animal foraging. While the question of optimality…
With the information explosion on the Web, search and recommendation are foundational infrastructures to satisfying users' information needs. As the two sides of the same coin, both revolve around the same core research problem, matching…
The Web is an important resource for understanding and diagnosing medical conditions. Based on exposure to online content, people may develop undue health concerns, believing that common and benign symptoms are explained by serious…
We consider the following distributed pursuit-evasion problem. A team of mobile agents called searchers starts at an arbitrary node of an unknown $n$-node network. Their goal is to execute a search strategy that guarantees capturing a fast…
Information access systems are getting complex, and our understanding of user behavior during information seeking processes is mainly drawn from qualitative methods, such as observational studies or surveys. Leveraging the advances in…
Searching in the Internet for some object characterised by its attributes in the form of data, such as a hotel in a certain city whose price is less than something, is one of our most common activities when we access the Web. We discuss…
In this paper we present the results of a user study on exploratory search activities in a social science digital library. We conducted a user study with 32 participants with a social sciences background -- 16 postdoctoral researchers and…
PageRank, the prestige measure for Web pages used by Google, is the stationary probability of a peculiar random walk on directed graphs, which interpolates between a pure random walk and a process where all nodes have the same probability…
We study the setting in which a mobile agent must locate a hidden target in a bounded or unbounded environment, with no information about the hider's position. In particular, we consider online search, in which the performance of the search…
Published experiments on spidering the Web suggest that, given training data in the form of a (relatively small) subgraph of the Web containing a subset of a selected class of target pages, it is possible to conduct a directed search and…
Contextualisation has proven to be effective in tailoring \linebreak search results towards the users' information need. While this is true for a basic query search, the usage of contextual session information during exploratory search…
Number of published scholarly articles is growing exponentially. To tackle this information overload, researchers are increasingly depending on niche academic search engines. Recent works have shown that two major general web search…
An overview of some methods of statistical physics applied to the analysis of algorithms for optimization problems (satisfiability of Boolean constraints, vertex cover of graphs, decoding, ...) with distributions of random inputs is…
This work falls in the areas of information retrieval and semantic web, and aims to improve the evaluation of web search tools. Indeed, the huge number of information on the web as well as the growth of new inexperienced users creates new…
To comprehend the hierarchical organization of large integrated systems, we introduce the hierarchical map equation, which reveals multilevel structures in networks. In this information-theoretic approach, we exploit the duality between…
Animals foraging alone are hypothesized to optimize the encounter rates with resources through L\'evy walks. However, the issue of how the interactions between multiple foragers influence their search efficiency is still not completely…
We examine the properties of all HTTP requests generated by a thousand undergraduates over a span of two months. Preserving user identity in the data set allows us to discover novel properties of Web traffic that directly affect models of…
Users who need several queries before finding what they need can benefit from an automatic search assistant that provides feedback on their query modification strategies. We present a method to learn from a search log which types of query…
Semantic memory is the subsystem of human memory that stores knowledge of concepts or meanings, as opposed to life specific experiences. The organization of concepts within semantic memory can be understood as a semantic network, where the…
Web is often used for finding information and with a learning intention. In this thesis, we propose a study to investigate the process of learning online across varying cognitive learning levels using crowd-sourced participants. Our aim was…