Abstract
The context in which a search takes place affects the Information Retrieval (IR) process. It affects the searcher’s interaction with the IR system, his expectations and his decisions about the documents he retrieves. Therefore, knowing more about what features are important in a searcher’s context and what they are used for, can help design more useful and successful IR systems. This paper has three main contributions. It starts with a literature review on the definition of context and on context taxonomies (1). A systematic representation of context features and uses, based on related work, is then proposed (2) and used in a survey on the use of context features in IR (3). This analysis has concluded that interaction context is the most used category of features and Indexing and Searching are the tasks where context features are most employed. This work, an initial phase of a PhD research, provides a systematic review of what is being done in the area and proposes a taxonomy for IR.
Highlights
Information Retrieval (IR) systems support their decisions solely on the query and document collection
A contextualised strategy might allow IR systems to learn and predict what information a searcher needs, learn how and when information should be displayed, present results relating them to previous information and to the tasks the user has been engaged in and decide who else should get the new information
This section reports on definitions in domains related to IR and does not intent to do a thorough review of definitions in other areas
Summary
Information Retrieval (IR) systems support their decisions solely on the query and document collection. In the field of Information Retrieval, there is a growing interest in improving the search process towards the user needs and context (Bierig & Goker 2006). Still in the decade of 1980, another project (Saracevic et al 1988, Saracevic & Kantor 1988a, Saracevic & Kantor 1988b) was dedicated to the characterization of the elements involved in information seeking and retrieving, such as the cognitive context involved in these processes. The purpose of this paper is threefold It starts with a literature review on the definition of context and on proposed context taxonomies (Section 2). A systematic representation of context features and uses, based on related work, is proposed (Section 3) and used in a survey on the use of context features.
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