Revisiting IR techniques for Collaborative search strategies

Abstract

This paper revisits some of the established Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to investigate effective collaborative search strategies.We devised eight search strategies that divided labour and shared knowledge in teams using relevance feedback and clustering. We evaluated the performance of strategies with a user simulation enhanced by a query-pooling method. Our results show that relevance feedback is successful at formulating effective collaborative strategies while further effort is needed for clustering. We also measured the extent to which additional members improved the performance and an effect of search progress on the improvement.