Adaptive IR for exploratory search support
Daniel Backhausen · 2012
Most Information Retrieval (IR) software is designed to fit a general user where users are submitting queries and the retrieval system returns a ranked list of results. Regardless of the user, the query always returns the same list of results. Individual aspects like age, gender, profession or experience are often not taken into account, for example the difference in searching between children and adults. Although long challenged by works such as Bates' berrypicking model [1], common systems still assume that the user has a static information need which remains unchanged during the seeking process. Moreover many systems are strongly optimized for lookup searches, expecting that the user is only interested in facts and not in complex problem solving.