Title: An overview of user-interactions in exploratory search: theoretical foundations, techniques, and research issues

Authors: Vikram Singh

Addresses: Computer Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, Haryana, India

Abstract: In the 21st century, an individual is enclosed with data plethora, which carries insights and knowledge. Though, to seek relevant objects, a user with uncertain information needs to opportunistically adopt several strategies, e.g., analytical search, search by analogy, etc, to aggregate the knowledge. These exploratory conversations are driven by focused-search and exploratory-browsing. In this paper, a critical study on various aspects of user-interactions in exploratory search is conducted, to trace the trends and the viability of the existing techniques and eventually to uncover the inherent limitations. It is evident that, despite the recent developments, a search task is mainly constrained due to 'insufficient means to specify user-search', 'inability to understand search-intent evolutions' and 'limited support for navigation towards unexplored-data'. The article assert that, proactive modelling of search-intents for automatic data exploration and visualisation are pivotal to deal highlighted issues and be a prospective trend to design the personalised data exploration techniques.

Keywords: big data analytics; exploratory search; human information interaction; interactive data exploration; information processing; information visualisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2021.119823

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2021 Vol.38 No.4, pp.561 - 583

Received: 29 Apr 2019
Accepted: 08 Jun 2019
Published online: 22 Dec 2021 *

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