On using graphical models for supporting context aware information retrieval

Lynda Tamine (1, 2) , Fatiha Boubekeur (1) , Mohand Boughanem (1, 2)

1 IRIT-SIG - Systèmes d’Informations Généralisées
2 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier

It is well known that with the increasing of information volumes across the Web, it is increasingly difficult for search engines to deal with ambiguous queries. In order to overcome this limit, a key challenge in information retrieval nowadays consists in enhancing an information seeking process with the user's context in order to provide accurate results in response to a user query. The underlying idea is that different users have different backgrounds, preferences and interests when seeking information and so a same query may cover different specific information needs according to who submitted it. This paper investigates the use of graphical models to respond to the challenge of context aware information retrieval. The first contribution consists in using CP-Nets as formalism for expressing qualititative queries. The approach for automatically computing the preference weights is based on the predominance property embedded within such graphs. The second contribution focuses on another aspect of context, namely the user's interests. An influence-diagram based retrieval model is presented as a theoretical support for a personalized retrieval process. Preliminary experimental results using enhanced TREC collections show the effectiveness of our approach.

Mots clés: Contextual information retrieval; Graphical models; Influence diagrams; CP-Nets

Domaines: Recherche d'information [cs.IR]

Lynda Tamine, Fatiha Boubekeur, Mohand Boughanem. On using graphical models for supporting context aware information retrieval. International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2007), 2007, Budapest, Hungary. pp.213-222. ⟨hal-00359550⟩