Information Retrieval in Context

Despite its many success stories, it is now a well-recognised fact in Information Retrieval (IR) that the query does not provide sufficient information for an IR system to interpret the information need of the user and identify correctly relevant documents to retrieve. So, it is becoming more and more important in IR to use any other form of information that is available in relation to the task, the user and the specific interaction (e.g. click-through data, location information, previous history of searches, explicit user preferences,etc.). This information is collectively known as context. In this talk I will present the research directions and the state of the art of context-aware IR. I will also present some examples of my own work in this area.