A Passage-Level Reading Behavior Model for Mobile Search

Reading is a vital and complex cognitive activity during users’ information-seeking process. Several studies have focused on understanding users’ reading behavior in desktop search. Their findings greatly contribute to the design of information retrieval models. However, little is known about how users read a result in mobile search, although search currently happens more frequently in mobile scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a lab-based user study to investigate users’ fine-grained reading behavior patterns in mobile search. We find that users’ reading attention allocation is strongly affected by several behavior biases, such as position and selection biases. Inspired by these findings, we propose a probabilistic generative model, the Passage-level Reading behavior Model (PRM), to model users’ reading behavior in mobile search. The PRM utilizes observable passage-level exposure and viewport duration events to infer users’ unobserved skimming event, reading event, and satisfaction perception during the reading process. Besides fitting the passage-level reading behavior, we utilize the fitted parameters of PRM to estimate the passage-level and document-level relevance. Experimental results show that PRM outperforms existing unsupervised relevance estimation models. PRM has strong interpretability and provides valuable insights into the understanding of how users seek and perceive useful information in mobile search.