Using Kintsch's discourse comprehension theory to model the user's coding of an informative message from an enabling information retrieval system

With new interactive technology, information science can use its traditional information focus to increase user satisfaction by designing information retrieval systems (IRSs) that inform the user about her task, and help the user get the task done, while the user is on‐line interacting with the system. By doing so, the system enables the user to perform the task for which the information is being sought. In previous articles, we modeled the information flow and coding operations of a user who has just received an informative IRS message, dividing the user's processing of the IRS message into three subsystem levels. In this article, we use Kintsch's proposition‐based construction–integration theory of discourse comprehension to further detail the user coding operations that occur in each of the three subsystems. Our enabling devices are designed to facilitate a specific coding operation in a specific subsystem. In this article, we describe an IRS device made up of two separate parts that enable the user's (1) decoding and (2) encoding of an IRS message in the Comprehension subsystem.