This study examines behavioral traits to determine what impact they have on average visit duration when interacting with a website, a major part of search engine and webpage performance metrics commonly reported in practice. A task-based design was created to examine participants' interaction with various websites containing a variety of media and…

Billions of people interact with Web search engines daily and their interactions provide valuable clues about their interests and preferences. While modeling search behavior, such as queries and clicks on results, has been found to be effective for various Web search applications, the effectiveness of the existing approaches are limited by…

In Web search, query and click log data are easy to collect but they fail to capture user behaviors that do not lead to clicks. As search engines reach the limits inherent in click data and are hungry for more data in a competitive environment, mining cursor movements, hovering, and scrolling becomes important. This dissertation investigates how…

The number of international students who pursue higher education in Western countries, such as the US, increases yearly. Asian international students are a significant proportion of international students from different countries. Numerous researchers have identified various challenges encountered by this group of international students, including…

The advent of the Internet and the ever-increasing capacity of storage media have made it easy to store, deliver, and share enormous volumes of data, leading to a proliferation of information on the Web, in online libraries, on news wires, and almost everywhere in our daily lives. Since our ability to process and absorb this information remains…

The prospect of a threat to one's health or an opportunity for improved health can spark emotional reactions--the fear of an illness or the hope of a healthier life. People are increasingly turning to the Internet to search for information related to such health issues. However, the dizzying amount of online health information--some of it of…

This dissertation analyzes the legal, social, technological, and cultural environment that gave rise to Google's library partnership program in order to propose an institutional corrective to Google's project to digitize cultural heritage. Interview research done with those actively involved with Google's project revealed the need for a history of…

Information retrieval (IR) systems have tremendously broaden users' access to information. However, users need to select their needs from trillions of information indexed daily. Due to the "semantic gap" between queries and indexed terms in IR system, whether users can satisfy their needs depends on whether they use the correct terms as…

Citation is a highly valued practice in the academic community. This mechanism supports an author's ideas, theories, and research; it acknowledges the scholarly contributions of others; and integrates academic works to enrich scholarly communication. Well-constructed citations, in addition to providing the appropriate bibliographic information…

The Web is large and expanding, making it challenging to attract new visitors to websites. Website operators often use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to boost the search engine rankings of their sites, thereby maximizing the inflow of visitors. Malicious operators take SEO to the extreme through many unsavory techniques that are often…

The worked-example effect, an application of cognitive load theory, is a well-supported method of instruction for well-structured problems (Chandler and Sweller, 1991; Cooper and Sweller, 1987; Sweller and Cooper, 1985; Tuovinen & Sweller, 1999; Ward and Sweller, 1990). One limitation is expertise-reversal effect, where advanced students…

The need for emotional interaction has already influenced various disciplines and industries, and online museums represent a domain where providing emotional interactions could have a significant impact. Today, online museums lack the appropriate affective and hedonic values necessary to engage art enthusiasts on an emotional level. To address…

Online discussion forums have become popular in recent times. They provide a platform for people from different parts of the world sharing a common interest to come together and topics of mutual interest and seek solutions to their problems. There are hundreds of thousands of internet forums containing tens of millions of discussion threads and…

Increasing use of the Internet has led to a proliferation of online communication and information sharing media. These media, each with its own set of affordances and limitations, are thought to encourage new ways to communicate. Interlocutors refashion general English into abbreviated and often pictographic representations of existing concepts.…

We have developed statistical techniques to improve the performance of document image search systems where the intermediate step of OCR based transcription is not used. Previous research in this area has largely focused on challenges pertaining to generation of small lexicons for processing handwritten documents and enhancement of poor quality…