Privacy-Aware Remote Information Retrieval User Experiments Logging Tool

Abstract

User behaviors and experiences are the fundamental parts of information retrieval systems, but are often difficult to collect, bringing challenges to both applications and research. Recently, researchers have been exploring more fine-grained user behavior than simple clicks, such as time patterns, mouse/scroll patterns, etc., with their own specific laboratory experimental platforms. However, the lack of public available toolkits for logging user behaviors and experiences leads to difficulties on field study of remote user experiments in real scenarios. In this work, we propose a Privacy-Aware Remote User Logging Tool for remotely collecting user behaviors and explicit experience feedback, with a special care for user privacy. With this tool, participants can conduct the user experiments remotely without time and location constraints, giving researchers the possibility to observe users' more natural behaviors and experiences.