Integrating query context and user context in an information retrieval model based on expanded language modeling

Abstract

Access to relevant information adapted to the needs and the context of the user is a real challenge. The user context can be assimilated to all factors that can describe his intentions and perceptions of his surroundings. It is difficult to find a contextual information retrieval system that takes into account all contextual factors. In this paper, both types of context user context and query context are integrated in an Information Retrieval (IR) model based on language modeling. Here, the query context include the integration of linguistic and semantic knowledge about the user query in order to explore the most exact understanding of user's information needs. In addition, we consider one of the important factors of the user context, the user's domain of interest or the interesting topic. A thematic algorithm is proposed to describe the user context. We assume that each topic can be characterized by a set of documents from the experimented corpus. The documents of each topic are used to build a statistical language model, which is then integrated to expand the original query model and to re-rank the retrieved documents. Our experiments on the 20-Newsgroup corpus show that the proposed contextual approach improves significantly the retrieval effectiveness compared to the basic approach, which does not consider contextual factors. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.