Modeling task-genre relationships for IR in the workplace

ABSTRACT

Context influences the search process, but to date research has not definitively identified which aspects of context are the most influential for information retrieval, and thus are worthy of integration in today's retrieval systems. In this research, we isolated for examination two aspects of context: task and document genre and examined the relationship between them within a software engineering work domain. In this domain, the nature of the task has an impact on decisions of relevance and usefulness, and the document collection contains a distinctive set of genre. Our data set was a document repository created and used by our target population. The document surrogates were meta-tagged by purpose and document type. Correspondence analysis of this categorical data identified some specific relationships between genres and tasks, as well as four broad dimensions of variability underlying these relationships. These results have the potential to inform the design of a contextual retrieval system by refining search results for this domain.

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INDEX TERMS

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

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Selection process

General Terms:
Design, Measurement

Keywords:
contextual information retrieval, correspondence analysis, enterprise search, genre, work tasks