Mind Your Language: Effects of Spoken Query Formulation on Retrieval Effectiveness
This addresses the problem of retrieval effectiveness for non-native English speakers using voice search, but it is incremental as it highlights an issue without proposing a solution.
The study examined how non-native English speakers formulate spoken queries for retrieval tasks and found that current search engines' rankings are sensitive to query formulation, indicating a need for more robust ranking methods.
Voice search is becoming a popular mode for interacting with search engines. As a result, research has gone into building better voice transcription engines, interfaces, and search engines that better handle inherent verbosity of queries. However, when one considers its use by non- native speakers of English, another aspect that becomes important is the formulation of the query by users. In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary study that we conducted with non-native English speakers who formulate queries for given retrieval tasks. Our results show that the current search engines are sensitive in their rankings to the query formulation, and thus highlights the need for developing more robust ranking methods.