Usage of Facial Expressions in Information Retrieval Systems

Abstract

As the Internet currently represents the dominating information resource, the need for more reliable web search engines gets increasing research focus. While many investigations have explored the use of implicit feedback to improve the user search results, no study has yet examined a more direct approach to the user’s mental state disclosure, his facial expressions while examining these results. This study tried to answer the following question: can we predict document relevance from the user’s facial expressions? The intuition is that the user mental state reflected in his facial expression while examining a relevant document is different from his expression while examining a non-relevant one. A conducted feasibility study revealed that the detected facial expressions corresponding to relevant and non-relevant documents were distinguishable by a trained neural network classifier but many collected data are required to predict the relevance of future documents.

Report

Mohamed Hussein and Tamer Elsayed, “Studying Facial Expressions as an Implicit Feedback in Information Retrieval Systems,” Unofficial Class Project Report, CMSC 828F: Introduction to HCI (Graduate Level), Fall 2004, instructed by François Guimbretière

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Last updated on Sat Oct 17^th 2006