Report on the ECIR 2011 workshop on information retrieval over query sessions
Ben Carterette, Paul David Clough, Evangelos Kanoulas, Mark Sanderson · ACM SIGIR Forum · 2012
Research in Information Retrieval has traditionally focused on serving the best results for a single query. Real users, however, often begin an interaction with a search engine with a sufficiently under-specified information need that they will need to reformulate before they find either the one thing or every thing they are looking for. We define a session as the sequence of queries and interactions that a user performs in service of an information need. The first workshop on Information Retrieval Over Query Sessions was held at ECIR 2011 in Dublin, Ireland, with the purpose of investigating questions of measuring, analyzing, and optimizing IR system behavior over a session of reformulations.