Integration of user profiles: models and experiments in information retrieval

https://doi.org/10.1016/0306-4573(90)90048-7Get rights and content

Abstract

One difficult problem in information retrieval (IR) is the proper interpretation of user queries. It is extremely hard for users to express their information needs in a specific yet exhaustive way. In an effort to alleviate this problem, two theoretical models have been proposed to utilize user characteristics maintained in the form of a user profile. Although the idea of integrating user profiles into an IR system is intuitively appealing, and the models seem viable, no research to date has established a foundation for the roles of user profiles in such a system. Aiming at the investigation of the roles of user profiles, therefore, this study first identifies and extends various query/profile interaction models to provide a ground upon which the investigation can be undertaken. From a continuum of models characterized on the basis of interaction types, metrics, and parameters, nearly 400 models are chosen to investigate the “model space.” New measures are developed based on the notion of user satisfaction/frustration. In addition, three different criteria are used to guide users in making judgments on the quality of retrieved items. Analysis of the data obtained from the experiments shows that, for a wide variety of criteria and metrics, there are always some query/profile interaction models that outperform the query alone model. In addition, preferable characteristics for different criteria are identified in terms of interaction types, parameters, and metrics.

References (29)

  • R.G. Crawford

    Bibliographic retrieval using a relational database system

    Proc. of the Annual Conference, Canadian Association for Information Science

    (1983)
  • I.A. MacLeod

    SEQUEL as a language for document retrieval

    Journal of ASIS

    (1979)
  • D.C. Blair et al.

    An evaluation of retrieval effectiveness for a full-text document-retrieval system

    Communications of the ACM

    (1985)
  • E. Svenonius

    Unanswered questions in the design of controlled vocabularies

    Journal of ASIS

    (1986)
  • Cited by (25)

    • Coauthorship networks and academic literature recommendation

      2010, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
      Citation Excerpt :

      A conventional way of acquiring interest profiles is to ask users to explicitly specify their interests. However, such a straightforward approach is likely to result in less accurate interest profiles because users may not be conscious about their interests and may not be willing to devote much effort in creating and maintaining a decent interest profile (Myaeng and Korfhage 1990). In addition, interest profiles generally evolve over time.

    • Agent-based approach for integrating user profile into a knowledge management process

      2000, Knowledge-Based Systems
      Citation Excerpt :

      A large number of models and approaches based on these methods have been proposed and tested. The definition of the majority of them has been based upon the representation or vector space model [2,6]. In this model, the documents, requests, and user profiles are considered as a set of vectors or points in a space of n dimensions, where n denotes the number of terms ti in a given source of information [10].

    • Visualization of a document collection: The vibe system

      1993, Information Processing and Management
    • Design of model-based interfaces for a real world information system

      2002, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Part A:Systems and Humans.
    • Towards new ways of evaluating methods of supporting requirements management and traceability using signal-to-noise ratio

      2019, ENASE 2019 - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text