Cognitive processes in query generation

Abstract

Known-item search is the search for a specific document that is known to exist. This task is particularly important in Personal Information Management (PIM), where it is the most common search activity. A major obstacle to research in search technologies for PIM is the lack of publicly accessible test corpora. As a potential solution, pseudo-desktop corpora and automatic query generation have been proposed. These approaches though do not take the cognitive processes into account that take place when a user formulates a re-finding query. The human memory is not perfect, and many factors influence a user's ability to recall information. In this work, we propose a model that accounts for these cognitive processes in the automatic query generation setting. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.