Tempo of search actions to modeling successful sessions

Considering search process in the evaluation of interactive information retrieval (IIR) is a challenging issue. This paper explores tempo of search actions (query, click, and judgement) to measure people's search process and performance. When we analyse how people consume their search resource (i.e., a total number of search actions taken to complete a task) over the time, it was observed that there was a different pattern in successful sessions and unsuccessful sessions. Successful sessions tend to have a regular tempo in search actions while poor sessions tend to have uneven distribution of resource usage. The resource consumption graph also allows us to observe where in the search process was affected by experimental conditions. Therefore, this paper suggests that tempo of search actions can be exploited to model successful search sessions.