Overview of the personalized and collaborative information retrieval (PIR) track at FIRE-2011

Abstract

The personalized and collaborative information retrieval (PIR) track at FIRE 2011 was organized with the aim of extending standard information retrieval (IR) ad-hoc test collection design to facilitate research on personalized and collaborative IR by collecting additional meta-information during the topic (query) development process. A controlled query generation process through task-based activities with activity logging was used by each topic developer to construct a final set of topics. The standard ad-hoc collection is thus accompanied by a new set of thematically related topics and the associated log information. This better simulates a real-world search scenario and encourages mining user information from the logs to improve IR effectiveness. A set of 25 TREC formatted topics and the associated metadata of activity logs were released for the participants to use. We illustrate the data construction phase in detail and also outline simple ways of using the additional information from the logs, such as query and document click history, to improve retrieval effectiveness.