A framework for investigating the interaction in information retrieval

To increase retrieval effectiveness, information retrieval systems must offer better supports to users in their information seeking activities. To achieve this, one major concern is to obtain a better understanding of the nature of the interaction between a user and an information retrieval system. For this, we need a means to analyse the interaction in information retrieval, so as to compare the interaction processes within and across information retrieval systems. We present a framework for investigating the interaction between users and information retrieval systems. The framework is based on channel theory, a theory of information and its flow, which provides an explicit ontology that can be used to represent any aspect of the interaction process. The developed framework allows for the investigation of the interaction in information retrieval at the desired level of abstraction. We use the framework to investigate the interaction in relevance feedback and standard web search

The Lucene for Information Access and Retrieval Research (LIARR) Workshop at SIGIR 2017

As an empirical discipline, information access and retrieval research requires substantial software infrastructure to index and search large collections. This workshop is motivated by the desire to better align information retrieval research with the practice of building search applications from the perspective of open-source information retrieval systems. Our goal is to promote the use of Lucene for information access and retrieval research

Performance comparison of clustered and replicated information retrieval systems

The amount of information available over the Internet is increasing daily as well as the importance and magnitude of Web search engines. Systems based on a single centralised index present several problems (such as lack of scalability), which lead to the use of distributed information retrieval systems to effectively search for and locate the required information. A distributed retrieval system can be clustered and/or replicated. In this paper, using simulations, we present a detailed performance analysis, both in terms of throughput and response time, of a clustered system compared to a replicated system. In addition, we consider the effect of changes in the query topics over time. We show that the performance obtained for a clustered system does not improve the performance obtained by the best replicated system. Indeed, the main advantage of a clustered system is the reduction of network traffic. However, the use of a switched network eliminates the bottleneck in the network, markedly improving the performance of the replicated systems. Moreover, we illustrate the negative performance effect of the changes over time in the query topics when a distributed clustered system is used. On the contrary, the performance of a distributed replicated system is query independent

Peer to Peer Information Retrieval: An Overview

Peer-to-peer technology is widely used for file sharing. In the past decade a number of prototype peer-to-peer information retrieval systems have been developed. Unfortunately, none of these have seen widespread real- world adoption and thus, in contrast with file sharing, information retrieval is still dominated by centralised solutions. In this paper we provide an overview of the key challenges for peer-to-peer information retrieval and the work done so far. We want to stimulate and inspire further research to overcome these challenges. This will open the door to the development and large-scale deployment of real-world peer-to-peer information retrieval systems that rival existing centralised client-server solutions in terms of scalability, performance, user satisfaction and freedom

Content or context? Searching for musical meaning in task-based interactive information retrieval

Creative professionals search for digital music to accompany moving images using interactive information retrieval systems run by music publishers and record companies. This research investigates the creative professionals and the intermediaries communication processes and information seeking and use behaviour with a view to making recommendations to information retrieval systems builders as to the extent of relative importance of content and contextual factors. A communications model is used to suggest that the meaning of music is determined by its listener and use context, as well as cultural codes and competences. The research is framed by a holistic approach based on Ingwersen and Jarvelin’s Interactive Information Seeking, Retrieval and Behavioral processes model

An evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval

In this paper we present an evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval developed within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The GeoCLEF track is dedicated to the evaluation of geographic information retrieval systems. The resource encompasses more than 600,000 documents, 75 topics so far, and more than 100,000 relevance judgments for these topics. Geographic information retrieval requires an evaluation resource which represents realistic information needs and which is geographically challenging. Some experimental results and analysis are reported

Creating a Dutch testbed to evaluate the retrieval from textual databases

This paper describes the first large-scale evaluation of information retrieval systems using Dutch documents and queries. We describe in detail the characteristics of the Dutch test data, which is part of the official CLEF multilingual texttual database, and give an overview of the experimental results of companies and research institutions that participated in the first official Dutch CLEF experiments. Judging from these experiments, the handling of language-specific issues of Dutch, like for instance simple morphology and compound nouns, significantly improves the performance of information retrieval systems in many cases. Careful examination of the test collection shows that it serves as a reliable tool for the evaluation of information retrieval systems in the future