Some(what) grand challenges for information retrieval

ABSTRACT

Although we see the positive results of information retrieval research embodied throughout the Internet, on our computer desktops, and in many other aspects of daily life, at the same time we notice that people still have a wide variety of difficulties in finding information that is useful in resolving their problematic situations. This suggests that there still remain substantial challenges for research in IR. Already in 1988, on the occasion of receiving the ACM SIGIR Gerard Salton Award, Karen Spärck Jones suggested that substantial progress in information retrieval was likely only to come through addressing issues associated with users (actual or potential) of IR systems, rather than continuing IR research's almost exclusive focus on document representation and matching and ranking techniques. In recent years it appears that her message has begun to be heard, yet we still have relatively few substantive results that respond to it. In this paper, I identify and discuss a few challenges for IR research which fall within the scope of association with users, and which I believe, if properly addressed, are likely to lead to substantial increases in the usefulness, usability and pleasurability of information retrieval.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ioannis Arapakis , Joemon M. Jose , Philip D. Gray, Affective feedback: an investigation into the role of emotions in the information seeking process, Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 20-24, 2008, Singapore, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1390334.1390403]
• 2: Borlund, P. (2003). The IIR Evaluation Model: a Framework for Evaluation of Interactive Information Retrieval Systems. In: Information Research, vol. 8, no. 3, paper no. 152. {Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/8-3/paper152.html}
• 3: Jay Budzik , Kristian J. Hammond, User interactions with everyday applications as context for just-in-time information access, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.44-51, January 09-12, 2000, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/325737.325776]
• 4: Cool, C. & Belkin, N. J. (2002). A classification of interactions with information. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (pp. 1--15). Greenwood Village, CO: Libraries Unlimited.
• 5: Norbert Fuhr, A probability ranking principle for interactive information retrieval, Information Retrieval, v.11 n.3, p.251-265, June 2008 [doi>10.1007/s10791-008-9045-0]
• 6: Peter Ingwersen , Kalervo Järvelin, The Turn: Integration of Information Seeking and Retrieval in Context (The Information Retrieval Series), Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2005
• 7: Järvelin, K., Price, S. L., Delcambre, L. M. L. & Nielsen, M. L. Discounted Cumulated Gain Based Evaluation of Multiple-Query IR Sessions. In ECIR 2008, Proceedings of the 2008 European Conference on Information Retrieval (pp. 4--15). Berlin: Springer Verlag.
• 8: Kelly, D. (2005). Implicit feedback: Using behavior to infer relevance. In A. Spink and C. Cole (Eds.) New Directions in Cognitive Information Retrieval (pp. 169--186). Berlin: Springer Verlag.
• 9: Diane Kelly , Nicholas J. Belkin, Display time as implicit feedback: understanding task effects, Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 25-29, 2004, Sheffield, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/1008992.1009057]
• 10: Diane Kelly , Jaime Teevan, Implicit feedback for inferring user preference: a bibliography, ACM SIGIR Forum, v.37 n.2, p.18-28, Fall 2003 [doi>10.1145/959258.959260]
• 11: Kuhlthau, C. C. (1991). Inside the search process: information seeking from the user's perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42, 361--371.
• 12: Nahl, D. & Bilal, D. eds (2007) Information and emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory. Medford, NJ: Information Today for ASIST.
• 13: Christopher Olston , Ed H. Chi, ScentTrails: Integrating browsing and searching on the Web, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.10 n.3, p.177-197, September 2003 [doi>10.1145/937549.937550]
• 14: S. E. Robertson , M. M. Hancock-Beaulieu, On the evaluation of IR systems, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.28 n.4, p.457-466, July-Aug. 1992 [doi>10.1016/0306-4573(92)90004-J]
• 15: Tefko Saracevic, Users lost: reflections on the past, future, and limits of information science, ACM SIGIR Forum, v.31 n.2, p.16-27, Fall 1997 [doi>10.1145/270886.270889]
• 16: K. Sparck Jones, A look back and a look forward, Proceedings of the 11th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.13-29, May 1988, Grenoble, France [doi>10.1145/62437.62438]
• 17: Spärck Jones, K. (2005). Meta-reflections on TREC. In E. M. Voorhees & D. K. Harman (Eds.) TREC: Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval (pp. 421--448). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• 18: Jaime Teevan , Susan T. Dumais , Daniel J. Liebling, To personalize or not to personalize: modeling queries with variation in user intent, Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 20-24, 2008, Singapore, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1390334.1390364]
• 19: Andrew H. Turpin , William Hersh, Why batch and user evaluations do not give the same results, Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.225-231, September 2001, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/383952.383992]
• 20: Andrew Turpin , Falk Scholer, User performance versus precision measures for simple search tasks, Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, August 06-11, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA [doi>10.1145/1148170.1148176]
• 21: Ryen W. White , Diane Kelly, A study on the effects of personalization and task information on implicit feedback performance, Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, November 06-11, 2006, Arlington, Virginia, USA [doi>10.1145/1183614.1183659]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval