Proactive information retrieval

Users interact with digital systems with some task in his mind. An example of a task could be writing a research paper on a topic. Tasks can be single or multi-staged. In the process of accomplishing their task objectives, a user often needs to interact with an information retrieval (IR) system to address one or more information needs which arise while working on their task, e.g. for writing their research paper on a chosen topic, the user needs to look for existing research works related to the topic. Traditional IR systems do not take into account a user's task intent while showing search results to the user for a specific query submitted by the user. In our work we propose next generation IR systems (i.e. proactive IR systems) which seek to anticipate the user's underlying task from his interaction with a digital system to automatically identify their information needs and to suggest potentially relevant information sources to help the user to accomplish his task