Enhancing information retrieval effectiveness through use of context

Information available in digital form has grown phenomenally in recent years. Finding the required information has become a difficult and challenging task. This is primarily due to the diversity and enormous volume of information available and the change in the nature of people now seeking information – from experts to ordinary users of desktop computers with varying interest and objectives. The problem of finding relevant information is further impacted by the poor retrieval effectiveness of most current information retrieval (IR) systems that are primarily based on keyword indexing techniques. Though these systems retrieve documents that contain those keywords specified in the query, the documents that are retrieved may not necessarily be in the context in which the user would have wanted them to be. This research works argues that exploiting the user’s context of the information need has the potential to improve the performance of information retrieval systems. Context can reduce the ambiguity by associating meanings to request/query terms, and thus limit the scope of the possible misinterpretations of query terms. A new way of defining context categories based on information type is proposed and this notion of context differs from the conventional way of defining information categories based on subject topics as it is closely linked with the situation in which the user’s needs for information originates. A new context-based information retrieval system where users could specify the context in which they are seeking information is presented. This work also includes a full-scale development, implementation and evaluation of the new context-based information syste