Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

To date information retrieval uses a 'bag of words' approach which primarily limits retrieved items to those with at least a partial word match. The output from these system rarely provides a fully relevant match. There are many contextual variables that affect the search process and its outcome that have yet to be examined, evaluated and integrated. Building on prior success that examined the relationship between document genre and work task as key factors that affect search, this research will probe work tasks in differing information use environments to ascertain how retrieval can be tailored to the specific work tasks undertaken within those domains, and how the interface should be modified to accommodate those differences. This research will entail the study of those environments and the development of context driven search interfaces to existing text retrieval systems.