Responsibilities

• Research Degrees Coordinator
• Member of the The Information Research Institute
• Admissions Tutor MA in Library & Information Management, MSc Information Management, MSc Informatics

Teaching

• Web Search Apps
• Digital Libraries
• Search & Retrieval
• Web Languages

Webpages

Please see my webpages for current detail and more information http://onsearchon.wordpress.com/

Background

Research Interests

• Search Solutions and Search Interfaces
• Information Seeking Behaviour and Information Interactions
• Automatic summarisation
• Computational Linguistics and Text Mining

Professional Interests

• British Computer Society (Member)
• BCS Information Retrieval Special Group (FIRSG)
• Higher Education Academy (Fellow)

I teach and research in Information Retrieval with a focus on the study of user interaction with information and its representation specifically in the process of search.  I have led and worked on various research projects relating to automatic summarisation, human computer dialogue and the evaluation of information search and discovery systems.  My teaching on 'search' as a subject area (systems development and as an activity/literacy) is aimed at information professionals who may specialise in web development, search engineering, user experience or work in areas of information innovation and digital data such as the digital humanities, digital libraries and e-research.  I have supervised a number of research students developing research approaches from lab based experimental information science, dialogue analysis and modelling, natural language programming and methods such as repetory grid and talk aloud protocols.

I obtained my MSc by research on the application of linguistic analysis for automatic abstract generation (and programming in logic) from Dept of Computation at University of Manchester and I obtained my PhD in the resolution of elliptical structures in natural language dialogue whilst working in the  Centre for Computational Linguistics at UMIST (now NacTem at the University of Manchester).

Publications

Image seeking in multilingual environments: A study of the user experience.  Information Research (accepted for publication August 2012)

The process and affective environment of students’ personal information management.  ELiSS: Enhancing Learning in Social Science,  April 2012

Using semantic differentials for an evaluative view of the search engine as an interactive system  EuroHCIR 2012 Workshop, Nijmegen 25th Aug

Shifting Contexts: relating the user, search and system in teaching Information Retrieval In: Efthimis N. Efthimiadis , Juan Manuel Fernandez Luna, Juan Huete and Andrew MacFarlane (Eds) Approaches to teaching and learning in information retrieval, Springer Verlag, 2010   The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.

 Beyond usability: the study of functionality of the 2.0 online catalogue. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 16(2), 2010.  pp228-250

 A study of users’ image seeking behaviour in FlickLing. In Evaluating Systems for Multilingual and Multimodal Information 9th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2008, Aarhus, Denmark, September 17-19, 2008, Revised Selected Papers, pp. 251-259. Berlin: Springer, 2009

User interactions with results summaries (Position paper) Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR 2007 Workshop on Web Information Seeking and Interaction, 27th July 2007, Amsterdam.

User satisfaction as a measure of system performance. Journal of Librarianship and Information Scienc, 39, 2007. 142-152

Using the repertory grid and laddering technique to determine the user’s evaluative model of search engines. Journal of Documentation, 63(2), March 2007. 259-280.

 Optimal results presentation for dynamic search (a position paper). Paper at the First International Workshop on Adaptive Information Retrieval (AIR), 14th Oct, Glasgow, 2006

Using the information seeker to elicit construct models for search engine evaluation. Journal of American Society of Information Science &Technology, 55(9), July 2004. 794-806.

Awareness, use and opinions of methodological search filters used for the retrieval of evidence-based medical literature. Health Information Libraries Journals, 21(1), March 2004. 33-43.

 Task dimensions of user evaluations of information retrieval systems. Information Research, 8(4), July 2003 [URL: http://informationr.net/ir/8-4/paper157.html]

Devise: A framework for the evaluation of Internet search engines. Library and Information Commission Research Report100, Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries.Report, 2001

Image, audio and text: a review of recent research in information retrieval. New Review of Information and Library Research, 6, 2000

A critical review of system-centred to user-centred evaluation of automatic abstracting research. New Review of Information and Library Research, 5, 1999

Evaluation: A perspective on automatic abstracting research. European Language Resources Association (ELRA) Newsletter, vol 3(2), May 1998.

Proposal for a user centred evaluation regime for automatic abstracting research Speech and Language Technology (ASLT) Workshop on Evaluation in Speech and Language Technology, University of Sheffield, June 17-18, 1997.

The application of linguistic processing to automatic abstract generation. In: Spark-Jones, K. and Willett, P. (Eds) Readings in Information Retrieval, Morgan Kauffman Publishers 1997. p 538-553

A natural language understanding system for reference resolution in information dialogues, In Leon, R (Ed) Information Retrieval: New systems and current research, Vol(2), 1996, pp81-100

Automatic abstracting research, Library Review, 44(8),1995

A classification of ellipsis based on a corpus of information seeking dialogues, Information Processing and Management 30(3), 1994

A natural language understanding system for reference resolution in information dialogues. BCS IRSG 16th Information Retrieval Research Colloquium, Strathclyde, 22-23rd March, 1994

Automatic Abstracting. British Library Research & Development Report No.6166, 1993

The application of linguistic processing to automatic abstract generation. Journal of Document and Text Management 1(3), 1993.

Technical report series to the British Library Research & Development Department, Feb 1992; March 1992, April, 1992, June 1992

Handling elliptical input in a natural language public information system. BCS IRSG 11th Information Retrieval Research Colloquium. Huddersfield Polytechnic, July, 1989.

A practical evaluation of two rule-based automatic abstracting techniques." Expert Systems for Information Management Vol 1(3), 1988.

Implementation strategies for robust database interfaces. Digest of the IEE Computing and Control Division Colloquium on Natural Language Understanding, London, 14th Nov,1988.

I also have been involved in conference programme committees including the British Computer Society's Information Retrieval Special Group and CiCLing International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics