Meeting of the MINDS: an information retrieval research agenda

Since its inception in the late 1950s, the field of Information Retrieval (IR) has developed tools that help people find, organize, and analyze information. The key early influences on the field are well-known. Among them are H. P. Luhn's pioneering work, the development of the vector space retrieval model by Salton and his students, Cleverdon's development of the Cranfield experimental methodology, Spärck Jones' development of idf, and a series of probabilistic retrieval models by Robertson and Croft. Until the development of the WorldWideWeb (Web), IR was of greatest interest to professional information analysts such as librarians, intelligence analysts, the legal community, and the pharmaceutical industry

Mobile Phone Text Processing and Question-Answering

Mobile phone text messaging between mobile users and information services is a growing area of Information Systems. Users may require the service to provide an answer to queries, or may, in wikistyle, want to contribute to the service by texting in some information within the service’s domain of discourse. Given the volume of such messaging it is essential to do the processing through an automated service. Further, in the case of repeated use of the service, the quality of such a response has the potential to benefit from a dynamic user profile that the service can build up from previous texts of the same user. This project will investigate the potential for creating such intelligent mobile phone services and aims to produce a computational model to enable their efficient implementation. To make the project feasible, the scope of the automated service is considered to lie within a limited domain of, for example, information about entertainment within a specific town centre. The project will assume the existence of a model of objects within the domain of discourse, hence allowing the analysis of texts within the context of a user model and a domain model. Hence, the project will involve the subject areas of natural language processing, language engineering, machine learning, knowledge extraction, and ontological engineering

Report on the Second International Workshop on the Evaluation on Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval (ECol'2017 @ CHIIR)

The 2nd workshop on the evaluation of collaborative information retrieval and seeking (ECol) was held in conjunction with the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction & Retrieval (CHIIR) in Oslo, Norway. The workshop focused on discussing the challenges and difficulties of researching and studying collaborative information retrieval and seeking (CIS/CIR). After an introductory and scene setting overview of developments in CIR/CIS, participants were challenged with devising a range of possible CIR/CIS tasks that could be used for evaluation purposes. Through the brainstorming and discussions, valuable insights regarding the evaluation of CIR/CIS tasks become apparent ? for particular tasks efficiency and/or effectiveness is most important, however for the majority of tasks the success and quality of outcomes along with knowledge sharing and sense-making were most important ? of which these latter attributes are much more difficult to measure and evaluate. Thus the major challenge for CIR/CIS research is to develop methods, measures and methodologies to evaluate these high order attributes

New perspectives on Web search engine research

Purpose–The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the context of Web search and search engine-related research, as well as to introduce the reader to the sections and chapters of the book. Methodology/approach–We review literature dealing with various aspects of search engines, with special emphasis on emerging areas of Web searching, search engine evaluation going beyond traditional methods, and new perspectives on Webs earching. Findings–The approaches to studying Web search engines are manifold. Given the importance of Web search engines for knowledge acquisition, research from different perspectives needs to be integrated into a more cohesive perspective. Researchlimitations/implications–The chapter suggests a basis for research in the field and also introduces further research directions. Originality/valueofpaper–The chapter gives a concise overview of the topics dealt with in the book and also shows directions for researchers interested in Web search engines

Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool (CIQUEST)

This report describes a three-year project (2000-03) undertaken in the Information Studies Department at The University of Sheffield and funded by Resource, The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. The overall aim of the research was to provide user support for query formulation and reformulation in searching large-scale textual resources including those of the World Wide Web. More specifically the objectives were: to investigate and evaluate methods for the automatic generation and organisation of concepts derived from retrieved document sets, based on statistical methods for term weighting; and to conduct user-based evaluations on the understanding, presentation and retrieval effectiveness of concept structures in selecting candidate terms for interactive query expansion. The TREC test collection formed the basis for the seven evaluative experiments conducted in the course of the project. These formed four distinct phases in the project plan. In the first phase, a series of experiments was conducted to investigate further techniques for concept derivation and hierarchical organisation and structure. The second phase was concerned with user-based validation of the concept structures. Results of phases 1 and 2 informed on the design of the test system and the user interface was developed in phase 3. The final phase entailed a user-based summative evaluation of the CiQuest system. The main findings demonstrate that concept hierarchies can effectively be generated from sets of retrieved documents and displayed to searchers in a meaningful way. The approach provides the searcher with an overview of the contents of the retrieved documents, which in turn facilitates the viewing of documents and selection of the most relevant ones. Concept hierarchies are a good source of terms for query expansion and can improve precision. The extraction of descriptive phrases as an alternative source of terms was also effective. With respect to presentation, cascading menus were easy to browse for selecting terms and for viewing documents. In conclusion the project dissemination programme and future work are outlined