Fact-Finding or Exploration: Characterizing Reading Strategies in User’s Search Activities

Adaptive information retrieval systems could provide users individual support for their current search activity. For that a clear detection and understanding of such activities are a necessity. In this paper we analyze reading strategies, such as Scanning, Skimming and ’hard’ Reading, given two search activities, namely Fact-Finding and Exploratory search activities. We analyzed the eye tracking data of a lab experiment and identified a positive correlated trend of ’hard’ Reading towards Exploratory searches and Skimming towards Fact-Finding searches. Using the interpretation of these reading strategies, we argue that we are able to draw conclusions about the possible search intent during individual search activities.