Towards a coherence-oriented complex search experience management method

Experiences of complex search tasks are important in social interaction and in problem solving. Considering the high importance of complex search experiences, many search experience management systems (SEMSs) have been introduced. Like any other life experience, complex search experiences should maintain 3 types of global coherence: temporal, causal and thematic coherence. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of the available SEMSs were designed to support all the 3 types of global coherence. In this paper, we introduce a coherence-oriented complex search experience management method named TimeTree. By organizing queries and clicks of a complex search task as a relative chronological source-tracking tree (RCST), TimeTree manages to support all the 3 types of global coherence. We describe a user study to evaluate TimeTree in 2 typical types of complex search task. The subjective evaluation results, the expert evaluation results, and the objective evaluation results all suggest that TimeTree can help maintain temporal, causal and thematic coherence for complex search experiences.