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Daniel Hienert

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Escaping the Filter Bubble: Evaluating Electroencephalographic Theta Band Synchronization as Indicator for Selective Exposure in Online News Reading

Selective exposure to online news occurs when users favor information that confirms their beliefs, creating filter bubbles and limiting diverse perspectives. Interactive systems can counter this by recommending different perspectives, but to achieve this, they need a real-time metric for selective exposure. We present an experiment where we evaluate Electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking as indicators for selective exposure by using eye tracking to recognize which textual parts participants read and using EEG to quantify the magnitude of selective exposure. Participants read online news while we collected EEG and eye movements with their agreement towards the news. We show that the agreement with news correlates positively with the theta band power in the parietal area. Our results indicate that future interactive systems can sense selective exposure using EEG and eye tracking to propose a more balanced information diet. This work presents an integrated experimental setup that identifies selective exposure using gaze and EEG-based metrics.

preprint2026arXiv

EyeLiveMetrics: Real-time Analysis of Online Reading with Eye Tracking

Existing eye tracking software have certain limitations, especially with respect to monitoring reading online: (1) Most eye tracking software record eye tracking data as raw coordinates and stimuli as screen images/videos, but without inherent links between both. Analysts must draw areas of interest (AOIs) on webpage text for more fine-grained reading analysis. (2) The computation and analysis of fixation and reading metrics are done after the experiment and thus cannot be used for live applications. We present EyeLiveMetrics, a browser plugin that automatically maps raw gaze coordinates to text in real time. The plugin instantly calculates, stores, and provides fixation, saccade, and reading measures on words and paragraphs so that gaze behavior can be analyzed immediately. We also discuss the results of a comparative evaluation. EyeLiveMetrics offers a flexible way to measure reading on the web - for research experiments and live applications.

preprint2026arXiv

MIRA: An LLM-Assisted Benchmark for Multi-Category Integrated Retrieval

Users increasingly expect modern search systems to offer a unified interface that seamlessly retrieves information from diverse data sources and formats. However, current information retrieval (IR) evaluation benchmarks have not kept pace with this development, primarily due to the lack of test collections that represent the diversity of contemporary search domains. We address this critical gap with MIRA, a novel benchmark based on a large-scale social science search platform. MIRA is designed for category-aware ranking across heterogeneous categories - Publications, Research Data, Variables, and Instruments & Tools - within a single, unified evaluation framework. The proposed collection is distinctive in several ways: (1) it is built upon real user queries, providing a more realistic basis for evaluation; (2) it covers scholarly items from four distinct categories, enabling multi-faceted evaluation; and (3) it leverages a Large Language Model to generate topic descriptions and narratives, as well as for relevance assessment with respect to these topics, substantially reducing the labor and cost of test collection generation. We release this resource to benefit the community by providing a foundational testbed for the research on multi-faceted, category-aware, integrated, or cross-category information retrieval.

preprint2022arXiv

SaL-Lightning Dataset: Search and Eye Gaze Behavior, Resource Interactions and Knowledge Gain during Web Search

The emerging research field Search as Learning investigates how the Web facilitates learning through modern information retrieval systems. SAL research requires significant amounts of data that capture both search behavior of users and their acquired knowledge in order to obtain conclusive insights or train supervised machine learning models. However, the creation of such datasets is costly and requires interdisciplinary efforts in order to design studies and capture a wide range of features. In this paper, we address this issue and introduce an extensive dataset based on a user study, in which $114$ participants were asked to learn about the formation of lightning and thunder. Participants' knowledge states were measured before and after Web search through multiple-choice questionnaires and essay-based free recall tasks. To enable future research in SAL-related tasks we recorded a plethora of features and person-related attributes. Besides the screen recordings, visited Web pages, and detailed browsing histories, a large number of behavioral features and resource features were monitored. We underline the usefulness of the dataset by describing three, already published, use cases.

preprint2020arXiv

'A Modern Up-To-Date Laptop' -- Vagueness in Natural Language Queries for Product Search

With the rise of voice assistants and an increase in mobile search usage, natural language has become an important query language. So far, most of the current systems are not able to process these queries because of the vagueness and ambiguity in natural language. Users have adapted their query formulation to what they think the search engine is capable of, which adds to their cognitive burden. With our research, we contribute to the design of interactive search systems by investigating the genuine information need in a product search scenario. In a crowd-sourcing experiment, we collected 132 information needs in natural language. We examine the vagueness of the formulations and their match to retailer-generated content and user-generated product reviews. Our findings reveal high variance on the level of vagueness and the potential of user reviews as a source for supporting users with rather vague search intents.

preprint2020arXiv

The Role of Word-Eye-Fixations for Query Term Prediction

Throughout the search process, the user's gaze on inspected SERPs and websites can reveal his or her search interests. Gaze behavior can be captured with eye tracking and described with word-eye-fixations. Word-eye-fixations contain the user's accumulated gaze fixation duration on each individual word of a web page. In this work, we analyze the role of word-eye-fixations for predicting query terms. We investigate the relationship between a range of in-session features, in particular, gaze data, with the query terms and train models for predicting query terms. We use a dataset of 50 search sessions obtained through a lab study in the social sciences domain. Using established machine learning models, we can predict query terms with comparably high accuracy, even with only little training data. Feature analysis shows that the categories Fixation, Query Relevance and Session Topic contain the most effective features for our task.

preprint2015arXiv

Exploring semantically-related concepts from Wikipedia: the case of SeRE

In this paper we present our web application SeRE designed to explore semantically related concepts. Wikipedia and DBpedia are rich data sources to extract related entities for a given topic, like in- and out-links, broader and narrower terms, categorisation information etc. We use the Wikipedia full text body to compute the semantic relatedness for extracted terms, which results in a list of entities that are most relevant for a topic. For any given query, the user interface of SeRE visualizes these related concepts, ordered by semantic relatedness; with snippets from Wikipedia articles that explain the connection between those two entities. In a user study we examine how SeRE can be used to find important entities and their relationships for a given topic and to answer the question of how the classification system can be used for filtering.

preprint2015arXiv

Making sense of Open Data Statistics with Information from Wikipedia

Today, more and more open data statistics are published by governments, statistical offices and organizations like the United Nations, The World Bank or Eurostat. This data is freely available and can be consumed by end users in interactive visualizations. However, additional information is needed to enable laymen to interpret these statistics in order to make sense of the raw data. In this paper, we present an approach to combine open data statistics with historical events. In a user interface we have integrated interactive visualizations of open data statistics with a timeline of thematically appropriate historical events from Wikipedia. This can help users to explore statistical data in several views and to get related events for certain trends in the timeline. Events include links to Wikipedia articles, where details can be found and the search process can be continued. We have conducted a user study to evaluate if users can use the interface intuitively, if relations between trends in statistics and historical events can be found and if users like this approach for their exploration process.

preprint2015arXiv

WHOSE - A Tool for Whole-Session Analysis in IIR

One of the main challenges in Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) evaluation is the development and application of re-usable tools that allow researchers to analyze search behavior of real users in different environments and different domains, but with comparable results. Furthermore, IIR recently focuses more on the analysis of whole sessions, which includes all user interactions that are carried out within a session but also across several sessions by the same user. Some frameworks have already been proposed for the evaluation of controlled experiments in IIR, but yet no framework is available for interactive evaluation of search behavior from real-world information retrieval (IR) systems with real users. In this paper we present a framework for whole-session evaluation that can also utilize these uncontrolled data sets. The logging component can easily be integrated into real-world IR systems for generating and analyzing new log data. Furthermore, due to a supplementary mapping it is also possible to analyze existing log data. For every IR system different actions and filters can be defined. This allows system operators and researchers to use the framework for the analysis of user search behavior in their IR systems and to compare it with others. Using a graphical user interface they have the possibility to interactively explore the data set from a broad overview down to individual sessions.

preprint2012arXiv

Dealing with Sparse Document and Topic Representations: Lab Report for CHiC 2012

We will report on the participation of GESIS at the first CHiC workshop (Cultural Heritage in CLEF). Being held for the first time, no prior experience with the new data set, a document dump of Europeana with ca. 23 million documents, exists. The most prominent issues that arose from pretests with this test collection were the very unspecific topics and sparse document representations. Only half of the topics (26/50) contained a description and the titles were usually short with just around two words. Therefore we focused on three different term suggestion and query expansion mechanisms to surpass the sparse topical description. We used two methods that build on concept extraction from Wikipedia and on a method that applied co-occurrence statistics on the available Europeana corpus. In the following paper we will present the approaches and preliminary results from their assessments.

preprint2012arXiv

Extraction of Historical Events from Wikipedia

The DBpedia project extracts structured information from Wikipedia and makes it available on the web. Information is gathered mainly with the help of infoboxes that contain structured information of the Wikipedia article. A lot of information is only contained in the article body and is not yet included in DBpedia. In this paper we focus on the extraction of historical events from Wikipedia articles that are available for about 2,500 years for different languages. We have extracted about 121,000 events with more than 325,000 links to DBpedia entities and provide access to this data via a Web API, SPARQL endpoint, Linked Data Interface and in a timeline application.

preprint2012arXiv

Integrating Interactive Visualizations in the Search Process of Digital Libraries and IR Systems

Interactive visualizations for exploring and retrieval have not yet become an integral part of digital libraries and information retrieval systems. We have integrated a set of interactive graphics in a real world social science digital library. These visualizations support the exploration of search queries, results and authors, can filter search results, show trends in the database and can support the creation of new search queries. The use of weighted brushing supports the identification of related metadata for search facets. We discuss some use cases of the combination of IR systems and interactive graphics. In a user study we verify that users can gain insights from statistical graphics intuitively and can adopt interaction techniques.

preprint2012arXiv

Visualizations in Exploratory Search: A User Study with Stock Market Information

In this paper we present an approach that integrates interactive visualizations in the exploratory search process. In this model visualizations can act as hubs where large amounts of information are made accessible in easy user interfaces. Through interaction techniques this information can be combined with related information on the World Wide Web. We applied the new search concept to the domain of stock market information and conducted a user study. Participants could use this interface without instructions, could complete complex tasks like identifying related information items, link heterogeneous information types and use different interaction techniques to access related information more easily. In this way, users could quickly acquire knowledge in an unfamiliar domain.

preprint2011arXiv

Web-Based Multi-View Visualizations for Aggregated Statistics

With the rise of the open data movement a lot of statistical data has been made publicly available by governments, statistical offices and other organizations. First efforts to visualize are made by the data providers themselves. Data aggregators go a step beyond: they collect data from different open data repositories and make them comparable by providing data sets from different providers and showing different statistics in the same chart. Another approach is to visualize two different indicators in a scatter plot or on a map. The integration of several data sets in one graph can have several drawbacks: different scales and units are mixed, the graph gets visually cluttered and one cannot easily distinguish between different indicators. Our approach marks a combination of (1) the integration of live data from different data sources, (2) presenting different indicators in coordinated visualizations and (3) allows adding user visualizations to enrich official statistics with personal data. Each indicator gets its own visualization, which fits best for the individual indicator in case of visualization type, scale, unit etc. The different visualizations are linked, so that related items can easily be identified by using mouse over effects on data items.