An analysis of querying behaviors of domain knowledgeable users and novice users

Users with different amount of domain or topic knowledge tend to find different results, when searching on the same topic. We were interested in finding out how domain or topic knowledge is associated with users’ querying behaviors, which would result in different results. In this study, thirty-five students participated in a user experiment, conducted searches from genomics data set that was used by TREC Genomics track 2004. The participants’ background domain knowledge and the knowledge of each individual topics was assessed, before they performed the search tasks. Their querying behaviors were recorded. The results demonstrate that domain knowledge level is significantly associated with the number of search terms in queries: the more knowledgeable, the more search terms. Further analyses are planned to be conducted.