Page 138 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

OU Shiyan, TANG Zhengui & SU Feifei / Construction and usage of terminology services for information retrieval 137

The forth usage mode is automatic query expansion. As shown in Figure 12, this mode is to
automatically expand the query term input by a user using its synonyms and English translations
returned by terminology services. The system combines the original query term with its synonyms
and English translations using the logical operator “OR” to form a new query and then execute
information retrieval.

Figure 12. Terminology service usage mode 4: Automatic query expansion.

4.2 Usability evaluation and results

Usability evaluation is to describe and measure the usability of information systems and
quantitatively represent its usability degree. The usability evaluation methods can be divided into
two broad categories: expert-based evaluation and user-based evaluation. The former is mainly
used in the design stage of a product, whereas the latter is often used in testing final products
(Roger, 2011) . In this study, we evaluated the usability of the four usage modes of terminology
services using user-based evaluation and expected to find the usage mode that has the best
usability.
(1) Usefulness evaluation criteria and their weights
It was apparent from the definition of usability that effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction