Web Information Retrieval for Complex Not-Informational Intents: An Introduction to User Intent Analysis.
Debora Donato · 2011
The World Wide Web has been showing an incredible capacity of renewing itself not only by adapting in order to fulfill mutable users’ needs but also fomenting new types of exigencies and requirements. For such a reason classical web information retrieval models developed around the concept of query seem not anymore adequate to satisfy complex and transactional needs for which the final goal is to accomplish a task rather than to find information. Transactional need satisfaction is not reached by showing the user with a list of documents but by reducing the total time from the moment the user issues the query to the moment the transaction is accomplished. Better support for complex queries can be obtained by a careful User Intent Analysis. In the rest of this paper, we present the reader with some of the most promising lines of research that are currently try to investigate intents and goals by focusing on all the activity related to intent satisfaction rather than on a single query.