Design of a study to evaluate the effectiveness of a spoken language interface to information systems

Users of digital libraries and other information systems typically carry out searches with very short queries, on the order of two words or so. This makes it very difficult for the systems to disambiguate their queries and identify potentially relevant documents, resulting in sub-optimal retrieval performance. We hypothesize that users will provide better and more useful descriptions of their information problems if they are able to speak to the system and easily indicate through speech and gesture those documents and aspects of documents which they find useful, and not useful. In this paper, a spoken interface is described, and a planned wizard of oz study will be introduced.