Development and evaluation of information retrieval methods to support users with complex information needs

解决复杂的现实世界问题通常需要访问大量信息。一开始，用户可能对主题领域知之甚少，并且可能不知道他需要什么信息来解决手头的问题。当前可用的搜索引擎非常擅长检索主题相关的文档以响应明确定义的查询。然而，如果用户对问题领域没有很好的理解，并且无法制定有效的查询，那么现有的搜索引擎就没有多大帮助。当前用户具有复杂的搜索任务，例如“我需要知道什么才能在加拿大创办自己的公司？”，需要迭代地制定多个查询，浏览大量检索到的文档，并识别重要的事实、实体（例如人员、组织）及其相互关系，以获得解决手头问题所需的必要知识。在拟议的研究中，我将研究如何在用户复杂的问题解决过程中为他们提供连贯的信息搜索体验。这包括设计方法，用于在文档中查找有用的信息块、概念和实体，识别它们之间的关系并以有意义且连贯的方式将它们呈现给用户。

Solving complex real world problems usually requires access to large amounts of information. At the start, a user may have little knowledge of the subject domain and may not know what information he needs in order to solve the problem at hand. Currently available search engines are very good at retrieving topically relevant documents in response to a well-defined query. However, if a user does not have a good understanding of the problem domain, and cannot formulate effective queries, then existing search engines are not very helpful. Currently a user with a complex search task, e.g. "What do I need to know to start my own company in Canada?", needs to formulate iteratively several queries, go through large numbers of retrieved documents, and identify important facts, entities (e.g. people, organizations), and their interrelationships in order to obtain the necessary knowledge needed to solve the problem at hand. In the proposed research I will investigate how to provide users with a coherent information seeking experience throughout their complex problem solving processes. This includes the design of methods for finding useful information nuggets, concepts and entities in documents, identifying relationships between them and presenting them in a meaningful and coherent way to the user.