InfoSeeker Souvick Ghosh attended the 41^st Annual European Conference on Information Retrieval in Cologne, German. Souvick presented “Exploring Result Presentation in Conversational IR using a Wizard-of-Oz Study” at ECIR as part of the Doctoral Consortium.

Souvick Ghosh presented his work that reflects on recent researches in conversational IR that have explored problems related to context enhancement, question-answering, and query reformulations. His work focused on result presentation over audio channels. The linear and transient nature of speech makes it cognitively challenging for the user to process a large amount of information. Presenting the search results (from SERP) is equally challenging, as it is not feasible to read out the list of results. He proposes a study to evaluate the users’ preference of modalities when using conversational search systems. The study aims to understand how results should be presented in a conversational search system. Through observation of how users search using audio queries, interact with the intermediary, and process the results presented, insight can be developed on how to present results more efficiently in a conversational search setting. Additionally, there are plans to explore the effectiveness and consistency of different media in a conversational search setting. Observations in this work will inform future designs and help to create a better understanding of such systems. 

Souvick had a few words to reflect on his experience at ECIR 2019: “I was lucky to have Dr. Udo Kruschwitz as my mentor and we had some great discussions about my dissertation ideas, research in general, and the life of a Ph.D. student. It also gave me the opportunity to catch up with some old friends in Europe and make some new ones.”