by Kien Tjin-Kam-Jet, Dolf Trieschnigg, and Djoerd Hiemstra
This paper investigates the problem of using free-text queries as an alternative means for searching 'behind' web forms. We introduce a novel specification language for specifying free-text interfaces, and report the results of a user study where we evaluated our prototype in a travel planner scenario. Our results show that users prefer this free-text interface over the original web form and that they are about 9% faster on average at completing their search tasks.
The paper will be presented at the Information Retrieval Facility Conference IRFC 2011 on 6 June in Vienna, Austria