Task Based Information Retrieval

对搜索的需求通常来自于人们实现目标或任务（例如预订旅行、购买房屋等）的需求。当代搜索引擎关注于检索与所提交的查询相关的文档，而不是理解和支持导致人们提交查询的潜在信息需求（或任务）。因此，搜索引擎用户往往要向当前系统提交多个查询来实现单一信息的需求。已经识别出用户经常必须重新制定他们的查询以实现他们的最终目标，大多数当前的搜索引擎试图通过向他们建议查询来帮助用户更好地表达他们的需求，而不是当前发出的查询。然而，查询建议主要集中在帮助用户细化他们当前的查询，而不是帮助他们识别和探索与他们当前复杂任务相关的方面。例如，当用户发出查询“飞往巴塞罗那的航班”时，很明显用户正计划前往巴塞罗那，并且用户很可能还需要搜索巴塞罗那的酒店或从巴塞罗那机场的班车。由于查询建议主要集中在细化当前查询，因此常用搜索引擎提供的建议大多是“从LOCATION飞往巴塞罗那的航班”或“飞往巴塞罗那的航班-职业-名称”的形式，这些系统提供的结果页面不包含任何可以帮助用户预订酒店或机场班车的信息。对于诸如安排旅行的非常常见的任务，可以通过需要实现的（子）任务的列表来手动地识别和引导用户，以便完成某个任务（当用户试图安排旅行时，预订航班、寻找酒店、寻找兴趣点等）。然而，考虑到搜索引擎用于的各种任务，这只可能用于其中的一小部分。此外，搜索引擎经常被用于完成如此复杂的任务，以至于搜索引擎本身往往缺乏必要的任务知识来决定下一步该做什么。例如，一个搜索引擎在没有先验知识的情况下寻找如何维护汽车的信息，首先需要使用搜索引擎来识别需要维护的汽车部件，并发出单独的查询来了解维护每个部件的信息。因此，检索系统，可以自动检测用户试图实现的任务，并引导他们通过该过程是必要的，其中搜索任务已被预先定义为一个原子的信息需要，包括一组相关的（子）任务。尽管设计信息检索（IR）系统，可以表征/识别任务，并能有效地响应他们被列为在信息检索的巨大挑战之一，在这个方向上取得了很小的进展。这个建议的主要目标是设计面向任务的检索系统，检索系统，可以自动检测用户试图实现的任务，并引导他们通过所需的过程（步骤）来实现任务。

The need for search often arises from a person's need to achieve a goal, or a task such as booking travels, buying a house, etc. Contemporary search engines focus on retrieving documents relevant to the query submitted as opposed to understanding and supporting the underlying information needs (or tasks) that have led a person to submit the query. Therefore, search engine users often have to submit multiple queries to the current systems to achieve a single information need. Having identified that users often have to reformulate their queries in order to achieve their final goal, most current search engines attempt to assist users towards a better expression of their needs by suggesting queries to them, other than the query currently issued. However, query suggestions mainly focus on helping the user refine their current query, as opposed to helping them identify and explore aspects related to their current complex tasks. For example, when a user issues the query "flights to Barcelona", it is clear that the user is planning to travel to Barcelona and it is very likely that the user will also need to search for hotels in Barcelona or for shuttles from Barcelona airport. Since query suggestions mainly focus on refining the current query, suggestions provided by commonly used search engines are mostly of the form "flights to Barcelona from LOCATION", or "FLIGHT-CAREER-NAME flights to Barcelona" and the result pages provided by these systems do not contain any information that could help users book hotels or shuttles from the airport. For very common tasks such as arranging travels, it may be possible to manually identify and guide the user through a list of (sub)tasks that need to be achieved in order to complete a certain task (booking a flight, finding a hotel, looking for points of interest, etc. when the user tries to arrange travel). However, given the variety of tasks search engines are used for, this would only be possible for a very small subset of them. Furthermore, quite often search engines are used for achieving such complex tasks that often the searcher themself lacks the task knowledge necessary to decide which step to tackle next. For example, a searcher looking for information about how to maintain a car with no prior knowledge would first need to use the search engine to identify the parts of the car that need maintenance and issue separate queries to learn about maintaining each part. Hence, retrieval systems that can automatically detect the task the user is trying to achieve and guide them through the process are needed, where a search task has been previously defined as an atomic information need that consists of a set of related (sub)tasks. Even though designing information retrieval (IR) systems that can characterize/identify tasks, and can respond to them efficiently is listed as one of the grand challenges in information retrieval, very little progress has been made in this direction. The main goal of this proposal is to devise task oriented retrieval systems, retrieval systems that can automatically detect the task that the user is trying to achieve and guide them through the process (steps) needed to achieve the task.