Proof of concept and evaluation of eye gaze enhanced relevance feedback in ecological context

Vaynee Sungeelee (1) , Francis Jambon (2, 3) , Philippe Mulhem (4)

1 LIG - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble
2 MeTAH - Modèles et Technologies pour l’Apprentissage Humain
3 M-PSI - Multimodal Perception and Sociable Interaction
4 MRIM - Modélisation et Recherche d’Information Multimédia [Grenoble]

The major method for evaluating Information Retrieval systems still relies nowadays on the "Cranfield paradigm", supported by test collections. This sheds light on the fact that human behaviour is not considered central to Information Retrieval. For instance, some Information Retrieval systems that need users feedback to improve results relevance can not completely be evaluated with classical test collections (since the interaction itself is not a part of the evaluation). Our goal is to work toward the integration of specific human behaviour in Information Retrieval. More precisely, we studied the impact of eye gaze analysis on information retrieval. The hypothesis is that acquiring the terms read by a user on the result page displayed may be beneficial for a relevance feedback mechanism, without any explicit intervention of the user. We have implemented a proof of concept which allows us to experiment with this new method of interaction with a search engine. The contributions of our work are twofold. First, the proof of concept we created shows that eye gaze enhanced relevance feedback information retrieval systems could be implemented and that its evaluation gives interesting results. Second, we propose the basis of a evaluation platform for Information Retrieval systems that take into account users behaviour in ecological contexts.

Mots clés: Relevance feedback; eye tracking; user behaviour; ecological context; proof of concept

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Recherche d'information [cs.IR]; Informatique

Vaynee Sungeelee, Francis Jambon, Philippe Mulhem. Proof of concept and evaluation of eye gaze enhanced relevance feedback in ecological context. Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE 2020), Jul 2020, Samatan, France. ⟨hal-02972992⟩