Users and Intermediaries in Information Retrieval: What Are They Talking About?

. Discourse between users and intermediaries (human agents), as they interact when searching large databases, serves the function of user modeling. Selected data from a real-life study are presented, categorizing the utterances and elicitations (questions) into seven categories. The results provide an empirical picture of constructing user models through discourse and searching. A stratified interaction model is used as a theoretical model and framework. 1 Information Retrieval and User Modeling When, at the beginning of 1950's, Calvin Mooers, one of the information science pioneers, coined the term information retrieval (IR) he also defined the problems addressed by the activity: (1) How to represent and organize information intellectually? (2) How to specify a search intellectually ? and (3) What systems and techniques to use for those processes? (Mooers, 1951). Since Mooers' time, IR has developed in sophistication in both theory and practice. Interaction evolved to become a hallma..