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Information at your fingertips: contextual IR in enterprise email

Published: 13 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We present ICARUS, a contextual information retrieval system, which uses the current email message and a multi-tiered user model to retrieve relevant content and make it available in a sidebar widget embedded in the email client. The system employs a dynamic retrieval strategy to conduct automated contextual search across multiple information sources including the user's hard drive, online documents (wikis, blogs and files) and other email messages. It also presents the user with information about the sender of the current message, which varies in detail and degree based on how often the user interacts with this sender. We conducted a formative evaluation which compared three retrieval methods that used different context information: current message plus a multi-tiered user model; current message plus a single-tiered, aggregate user model; and lastly, cur-rent message only. Results indicate that the multi-tiered user modeling approach yields better retrieval performance than the other two. In addition, the study suggests that dynamically determining which sources to search, what query parameters to use, and how to filter/re-rank results can further improve the effectiveness of contextual IR.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)How Knowledge Workers Use and Want to Use LLMs in an Enterprise ContextExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650841(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2012)EPICProceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/2166966.2167000(199-202)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2012

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cover image ACM Conferences
IUI '11: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
February 2011
504 pages
ISBN:9781450304191
DOI:10.1145/1943403
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 13 February 2011

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Author Tags

  1. context-sensitive search
  2. contextual information retrieval
  3. email
  4. inbox
  5. user modeling

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)How Knowledge Workers Use and Want to Use LLMs in an Enterprise ContextExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650841(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2012)EPICProceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/2166966.2167000(199-202)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2012

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