Designing Task Sensitive Retrieval Systems

Co-investigators: Elaine Toms, Luanne Freund, Chris Jordan, Tayze MacKenzie, Heather O'Brien

Research Support:
Emilie Dawe, Sandra Dawe, Tayze MacKenzie & Alexandra MacNutt

Dates: 2004-2008

Funding:Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC); Canada Research Chairs Program; Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI)

Summary

The overall goal of this research is to improve search outcomes by integrating explicitly or implicitly the contextual factors that are external to the document. The work will concentrate first on task which drives the search process; without a task there would be no search. The research will be accomplished in a series of steps that first isolate for further examination the characteristics of task that have the strongest potential effects, and then testing those variables in a task-sensitive search system.

Outcome

Papers

Toms, EG, O’Brien, H, Mackenzie, T, Jordan, C, Freund, L, Toze, S, Dawe, E, & MacNutt, A (2008). Task effects on interactive search: the query factor. Submitted

Posters

Toms, EG, Toze, S, O’Brien, HL, Freund, L & Jordan, C (2008). Fishing in query pools for task representations. submitted

Presentations (No Paper resulted)

Toms, EG (2006). Designing search systems to support work tasks and user goals. Presentation at the NorLIS Course, Information Access in Context, May 8-12, University of Tampere, Finland