A prototype debugger for search strategies

In this video we explore how we might take ideas from the world of software engineering and apply them to the challenge of search strategy formulation. We demonstrate a prototype ‘debugger’ which provides insight into the behaviour of search strategies, helping users to inspect, understand and validate them. This work was completed in collaboration with Jingfan Zang as part of his Master’s thesis in User Experience Engineering and was accepted as a demo paper at the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2023).

Abstract:

Knowledge workers such as healthcare information professionals, legal researchers, and librarians need to create and execute search strategies that are effective, efficient and error-free. The traditional solution is to use command-line query builders offered by proprietary database vendors. However, these are based on an archaic approach that offers limited support for the validation and optimisation of their output. Consequently, there are often errors in search strategies reported in the literature that prevent them from being effectively reused or extended.

In this paper, we demonstrate a new approach that takes inspiration from software development practice and applies it to the challenge of search strategy formulation. We demonstrate a prototype ‘debugger’ which provides insight into the construction and semantics of search strategies, allowing users to inspect, understand and validate their behaviour and effects. This has the potential to eliminate many sources of error and offers new ways to validate, optimise and re-use search strategies and best practices.