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KMi Seminars
Using Query Contexts in Information Retrieval
This event took place on Tuesday 31 July 2007 at 11:30

 
Professor Jian-Yun Nie University of Montreal, Canada

User query is an element that specifies an information need, but it is not the only one. Studies in literature have found many contextual factors that strongly influence the interpretation of a query. Recent studies have tried to consider the user's interests by creating a user profile. However, a single profile for a user may not be sufficient for a variety of queries of the user. In this study, we propose to use query-specific contexts instead of user-centric ones, including context around query and context within query. The former specifies the environment of a query such as the domain of interest, while the latter refers to context words within the query, which is particularly useful for the selection of relevant term relations. In this paper, both types of context are integrated in an IR model based on language modeling. Our experiments on several TREC collections show that each of the context factors brings significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Knowledge Management is...


Knowledge Management
Creating learning organisations hinges on managing knowledge at many levels. Knowledge can be provided by individuals or it can be created as a collective effort of a group working together towards a common goal, it can be situated as "war stories" or it can be generalised as guidelines, it can be described informally as comments in a natural language, pictures and technical drawings or it can be formalised as mathematical formulae and rules, it can be expressed explicitly or it can be tacit, embedded in the work product. The recipient of knowledge - the learner - can be an individual or a work group, professionals, university students, schoolchildren or informal communities of interest.
Our aim is to capture, analyse and organise knowledge, regardless of its origin and form and make it available to the learner when needed presented with the necessary context and in a form supporting the learning processes.