Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Using Google is easy. Finding information using Google is another matter. Over the decades, significant progress has been made in Information Retrieval (IR). However, IR is far from a solved problem and many challenges remain. First, most Web search engines take a short text query as input and output a ranked list of documents. The retrieval decision is made primarily based on the current query and document collection. The results for a given query are usually identical, independent of the user or the context in which the user made the request. Second, IR is an interactive process. With the current document-centered retrieval paradigm, interactive retrieval is treated as a sequence of independent simple retrieval decision making steps. However, it has been brought into attention that analysis of task-aware user sessions, which contain a sequence of requests submitted by a user to fulfill an information need, provides useful insight into the query behavior of the user. Third, most of present IR systems use keywords to query and index documents. However, this traditional keyword-based IR model provides little semantic context for the understanding of user information needs, which can lead to mismatch between query and document in search. Ideally, one would like to see the query and document match with each other, if they are topically relevant. Thus, the integration of semantic context according to the user's information need and the user's understanding of the documents into IR systems is needed to improve the IR performance. Fourth, organizations are now increasingly dealing with petabyte-scale collections of data. Context-sensitive and task-aware approaches become more challenging when dealing with big data. Hence, it is important to propose new algorithms and models that can effectively and efficiently process big data and implement the context-sensitive and task-aware approaches in big-data scenarios. In a world where data are growing at extraordinary rates, there is a huge demand for searching and analyzing big data more accurately and effectively to discover useful information. This research program tackles the problem of searching and discovering useful information from big text data. The long-term objective of the proposed research is to overcome the limitations of the existing IR methods and formally develop a new retrieval paradigm called context-sensitive and task-aware information search for big data. In particular, (1) we will develop a new theoretical retrieval framework for capturing rich user information and providing personalized search results; (2) we will develop novel task-based retrieval methods for context-sensitive information retrieval to optimize the long-term retrieval utility over an entire retrieval session; (3) we will develop new models for automatically analyzing and searching big data to efficiently extract knowledge and perform semantic matching.