An Integrated Model of Task, Information Needs, Sources and Uncertainty to Design Task-Aware Search Systems

The varieties of information seeking behavior encompass a range of practices and constructs such as the realization of an information need, selecting the nature of information, as well as information sources. Most of the past works have studied various constructs of the information seeking process, i.e., information, information need, and information sources individually. However, a person forms and re-forms his or her information seeking strategy based on continually shifting values of these dimensions associated with information seeking. This preliminary study conducted a survey with 15 search scenarios and multiple-choice characteristics completed by 114 Amazon's Mechanical Turk workers to find out more about how these constructs play a role in people's preferences regarding information seeking strategies. The study took an exploratory and inferential research approach to investigate how different forms of information and information needs might lead to different information sources by building binary classification models. The results show that the choice of sources can be predicted (with 80% accuracy) if the information need, representation, and form of information are apparent.