Addressing gaps in knowledge while reading

Reading is a common everyday activity for most of us. In this article, we examine the potential for using Wikipedia to fill in the gaps in one's own knowledge that may be encountered while reading. If gaps are encountered frequently while reading, then this may detract from the reader's final understanding of the given document. Our goal is to increase access to explanatory text for readers by retrieving a single Wikipedia article that is related to a text passage that has been highlighted. This approach differs from traditional search methods where the users formulate search queries and review lists of possibly relevant results. This explicit search activity can be disruptive to reading. Our approach is to minimize the user interaction involved in finding related information by removing explicit query formulation and providing a single relevant result. To evaluate the feasibility of this approach, we first examined the effectiveness of three contextual algorithms for retrieval. To evaluate the effectiveness for readers, we then developed a functional prototype that uses the text of the abstract being read as context and retrieves a single relevant Wikipedia article in response to a passage the user has highlighted. We conducted a small user study where participants were allowed to use the prototype while reading abstracts. The results from this initial study indicate that users found the prototype easy to use and that using the prototype significantly improved their stated understanding and confidence in that understanding of the academic abstracts they read.