The State-of-the-arts in Focused Search

The continuous influx of various text data on the Web requires search engines to improve their retrieval abilities for more specific information. The need for relevant results to a user’s topic of interest has gone beyond search for domain or type specific documents to more focused result (e.g. document fragments or answers to a query). The introduction of XML provides a format standard for data representation, storage, and exchange. It helps focused search to be carried out at different granularities of a structured document with XML markups. This report aims at reviewing the state-of-the-arts in focused search, particularly techniques for topic-specific document retrieval, passage retrieval, XML retrieval, and entity ranking. It is concluded with highlight of open problems

Overview of the INEX 2014 Interactive Social Book Search Track

Abstract. Users looking for books online are confronted with both pro-fessional meta-data and user-generated content. The goal of the Interac-tive Social Book Search Track was to investigate how users used these two sources of information, when looking for books in a leisure context. To this end participants recruited by four teams performed two different tasks using one of two book-search interfaces. Additionally one of the two interfaces also investigated whether user performance can be improved by providing a user-interface that supports multiple search stages.

Seven years of INEX interactive retrieval experiments – lessons and challenges

This paper summarizes a major effort in interactive search investigation, the INEX i-track, a collective effort run over a seven-year period. We present the experimental conditions, report some of the findings of the participating groups, and examine the challenges posed by this kind of collective experimental effort