iA Semantic Framework for Social Search

In recent years, online collaborative environments, e.g. social content sites (such as Twitter or Facebook) have significantly changed the way people share information and interact with peers. These platforms have become the primary common environment for people to communicate about their activity and their information needs and to maintain and create social ties. Status updates or microposts emerged as a convenient way for people to share content frequently without a long investment of time. Some social platforms even limit the length of a post. A post generally consists of a single sentence (e.g. news, a question), it can include a picture, a hyperlink, tags or other descriptive data (metadata). Contrarily to traditional documents, posts are informal (with no controlled vocabulary) and don't have a well established structure. Social platforms can become so popular (huge number of users and posts), that it becomes difficult to find relevant information in the flow of notifications. Therefore, organizing this huge quantity of social information is one of the major challenges of such collaborative environments. Traditional information retrieval techniques are not well suited for querying such corpus, because of the short size of the share content