Contextual support for Collaborative Information Retrieval

Recent research shows that Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR), in which two or more users collaborate on the same search task, has become increasingly popular. The presence of both search and collaboration behaviors makes CIR a complex search format, which further drives a critical need to understand CIR's search context. The contextual support for CIR should consider search contexts derived from both team members' search histories (including users' own search histories and partners' search histories) and their explicit collaboration (e.g., chatting). As it stands, existing studies on contextual search support only focus on Individual Information Retrieval (IIR) and only utilize individuals' own search histories. In this paper, we examine the unique search contexts (e.g., partners' search histories and team collaboration histories) in CIR. Based on a user study data collection with 54 participants, we find that compared to the use of individuals' own search histories, CIR contextual support is more effective when utilizing partners' search histories and teams' collaboration behaviors. More interestingly, though the explicit communication information (i.e., chat content) often involves massive noisy information, involving such noise does not affect the ranking of relevant documents since it also does not appear in relevant documents