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Information Retrieval in Context

  • Chapter
Advanced Topics in Information Retrieval

Part of the book series: The Information Retrieval Series ((INRE,volume 33))

Abstract

The situations in which we search form a context: a complex set of variables describing our intentions, our personal characteristics, the data and systems available for searching, and our physical, social and organizational environments. Different contexts can mean that we want search systems to behave differently or to offer different responses. Creating search systems and search interfaces to be contextually sensitive raises many research challenges: what aspects of a searcher’s context are useful to know about, how can we model context for use by retrieval systems and how do we evaluate search systems in context? In this chapter we will look at why differences in context can affect how we want search systems to operate and ways that we can use contextual information to help search systems behave more intelligently to our changing context. We will examine some new types of system that use different types of user context to learn about users, to adapt their response to different users or to help us make better search decisions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See http://iiix2010.org/.

  2. 2.

    See http://trec.nist.gov/.

  3. 3.

    See http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/context/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, 26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, G1 1XH, United Kingdom

    Ian Ruthven

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  1. Ian Ruthven
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Correspondence to Ian Ruthven .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Via G. Gradenigo, 6, Padua, 35131, Italy

    Massimo Melucci

  2. Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Ocata 1, Barcelona, 08003, Spain

    Ricardo Baeza-Yates

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Ruthven, I. (2011). Information Retrieval in Context. In: Melucci, M., Baeza-Yates, R. (eds) Advanced Topics in Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 33. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20946-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20946-8_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20945-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20946-8

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