Prioritization of the Factors Affecting the Use of Query Suggestions through the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process

Query suggestions are a supporting tool in information search tools that help users query formulation. The purpose of this study was to prioritize the factors affecting the use of query suggestions through the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP).

This study is an applied quantitative research that used a researcher-made questionnaire as instrument to collect the data. Five experts in data retrieval were asked to consider its items and comment on their relevance to the topic under study to ensure the validity of the questionnaire. The inconsistency rate was also used to verify the reliability of the questionnaire items. The questionnaire was distributed to 12 experts to gather the data for this study. To analyze the data, the FAHP was used in which the experts compared the pair of the main criteria, the sub-criteria of each criterion, and the final priority of the sub-criteria.

In this study, the criteria were classified into two categories: criteria related to the query suggestions system and criteria related to the user. Among the criteria related to the user criteria of domain knowledge and expertise, level of linguistic knowledge, and user’s query and among the criteria related to the query suggestions system the criteria of "source of creation of query suggestions (main and contextual), semantic features of query suggestions, and ease of use of query suggestions were the first to third priorities. Moreover, based on the final weight of each sub-criterion, the sub-criterion ‘the level of user’s expertise in the field of search’ was placed in the first priority; while ‘the difference between the user’s original language and the search information’ received the second priority; ’source of creation of query suggestions’ was in the third place; ‘providing semantic correlation between user’s queries and the query suggestions including broad, specific, related, and synonyms’ was placed in the fourth priority, and Providing a list of query suggestions in order of relevance placed in the fifth priority,  respectively.

The results of this study showed that ‘source of creation query suggestions’ and ‘domain knowledge and expertise’ was ranked first in prioritizing the main criteria. This finding suggests that the designers of the query suggestions should make a good choice of sources. Besides, prioritizing the factors affecting the use of query suggestions provides valuable information to designers and researchers in query suggestions. They can identify essential factors by prioritizing the factors affecting query suggestions and applying them in practice. Though the factors influencing the use of question suggestions are prioritized in this study, all factors are, in turn, important and should be considered when creating a question proposal to make high-quality suggestions.