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

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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.The first goal of my proposed research program is to design and implement information retrieval methods and tools for supporting the whole process of complex problem solving. The second goal is to develop methods for evaluating effectiveness of IR methods in supporting the user's complex problem solving. Evaluation of the developed methods will be done by means of both laboratory and user studies.