LBSC 796INFM 718R Week 8Relevance Feedback.ppt

LBSC 796/INFM 718R: Week 8Relevance Feedback Jimmy Lin College of Information Studies University of Maryland Monday, March 27, 2006 The IR Black Box Anomalous State of Knowledge Basic paradox: Information needs arise because the user doesn’t know something: “an anomaly in his state of knowledge with respect to the problem faced” Search systems are designed to satisfy these needs, but the user needs to know what he is looking for However, if the user knows what he’s looking for, there may not be a need to search in the first place Implication: computing “similarity” between queries and documents is fundamentally wrong How do we resolve this paradox? The Information Retrieval Cycle Upcoming Topics Different Types of Interactions System discovery – learning capabilities of the system Playing with different types of query operators “Reverse engineering” a search system Vocabulary discovery – learning collection-specific terms that relate to your information need The literature on aerodynamics refers to aircrafts, but you query on planes How do you know what terms the collection uses? Different Types of Interactions Concept discovery – learning the concepts that relate to your information need What’s the name of the disease that Reagan had? How is this different from vocabulary discovery? Document discovery – learning about the types of documents that fulfill your information need Were you looking for a news article, a column, or an editorial? Relevance Feedback Take advantage of user relevance judgments in the retrieval process: User issues a (short, simple) query and gets back an initial hit list User marks hits as relevant or non-relevant The system computes a better representation of the information need based on this feedback Single or multiple iterations (although little is typically gained after one iteration) Idea: you may not know what you’re looking for, but you’ll know when you see it Outline Explicit feedback: users explicitly mark relevant and irrelevant