Page 152 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

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Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese edition of Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019 151

technology, it has been widely used in psychology, medicine, advertising, human-computer
interaction and other fields. At present, the application of eye-tracking technology in the field of
information retrieval is also a frontier topic. Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) has a strong
interdisciplinary nature, involving psychology, sociology, computer science and other fields. It
is beneficial to use eye-tracking technology to better understand the motivation and mechanism
of information seeking behavior. Although some studies have sorted out the application of eye
tracking technology in the field of Library and Information Science, they have not yet elaborated
on the application of eye tracking technology in IIR and these studies only pointed out a general
overview of eye tracking measurement indicators and the combination of eye tracking and other
methods. The purpose of this paper is to expound the application of eye tracking technology in IIR
as comprehensively as possible, and put forward the prospect of the research trends of eye tracking
technology in IIR.
The literatures used in this paper mainly come from databases such as WoS, ACM, Springer,
Elsevier, Emerald, IEEE and CNKI. All of the selected literatures are closely related to IIR, the
main method of which is eye-tracking. The retrieval methods of English documents are (“interactive
information retrieval” or “information retrieval” or “information search behavior” or “information

seeking behavior” or “web search”) * (“eye-tracking”), and Chinese documents are (“交互式
信息检索”or“信息检索行为”or“信息搜索行为”or“信息搜寻行为”or“网页搜索
行为”).
Through reviewing the related researches, four findings can be concluded: 1) Eye-tracking
devices used in the research of IIR can be divided into three types: remote eye-tracker, head-
mounted eye-tracker and open resources; 2) Eye-tracking analysis indicators commonly
used in IIR research can be divided into two categories: functional identification indicators
(i.e. indicators inferring that stimulate materials can be noticed, found and recognized by the
subjects) and emotional identification indicators (i.e. indicators that reflect the emotional and
cognitive state of the subjects to stimulate); 3) Eye-tracking is often used in combination with
other methods, including three patterns: Eye-mouse collaboration model, Eye-NP collaboration
model and Eye-cognition collaboration model; 4) Four research topics about eye-tracking in IIR
are identified: the factors that influence the information search behavior, the browsing behavior
on SERP, implicit relevance feedback on SERP and the prediction and recommendation on
SERP.
Based on the findings above, an eye-tracking-based interactive information retrieval model is
constructed. Meanwhile, three limitations of the current work are pointed out, including: there is a
lack of in-depth study on the factors affecting IIR, such as individual characteristics, memory load
and cognitive style and so on; most studies focus on the application of eye-tracking technology
in desktop, lacking of the application in mobile; most eye-tracking studies are performed in the
controlled laboratory, and there is a lack of IIR research performed in real environment. In view of
the current limitations, we propose four research trends of eye-tracking research in IIR, including: