Intermediary's Elicitation and Patron's Retrieval Satisfaction

Abstract

An elicitation is a verbal request for information reflecting one's interests, concerns or perplexities in conversation. Elicitation behavior in studies of information retrieval interaction is, in fact, the micro-level of information-seeking behavior in which the user and the intermediary exchange information to fill the gaps in one's internal state of knowledge. This study aims to understand the intermediary's elicitation behavior in terms of linguistic forms, communicative functions (illocutionary force) and utterance purposes (semantic contents) and further to identify the relationship between intermediary's individual differences and search results satisfaction. Research methods include participatory observation, conversation analysis, content analysis and statistical analysis of elicitation frequencies and questionnaires. Our research results successfully identify the three dimensions of intermediary's elicitation behavior and characterize intermediary's inquiring minds and elicitation styles. Further analysis shows that there exists a significant relationship between inquiring minds/elicitation styles and user's relevance judgment of search results. (Article content in Chinese with English abstract)

Keywords

• intermediary
• elicitation behavior
• search interview
• reference interview
• information retrieval interaction