Beyond the Click: A Framework for Inferring Cognitive Traces in Search

Abstract: User simulators are essential for evaluating search systems, but they primarily copy user actions without understanding the underlying thought process. This gap exists since large-scale interaction logs record what users do, but not what they might be thinking or feeling, such as confusion or satisfaction. To solve this problem, we present a framework to infer cognitive traces from behavior logs. Our method uses a multi-agent system grounded in Information Foraging Theory (IFT) and human expert judgment. These traces improve model performance on tasks like forecasting session outcomes and user struggle recovery. We release a collection of annotations for several public datasets, including AOL and Stack Overflow, and an open-source tool that allows researchers to apply our method to their own data. This work provides the tools and data needed to build more human-like user simulators and to assess retrieval systems on user-oriented dimensions of performance.