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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/C004108/1
Title: Adaptive Search Models for Information Retrieval
Principal Investigator: Jose, Professor JM
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: School of Computing Science
Organisation: University of Glasgow
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 August 2005 Ends: 30 November 2006 Value (£): 58,954
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Information & Knowledge Mgmt
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
The aim of the proposed research is the development of techniques to promote effective Web searching. This specific proposal is for the creation of search models that adapt to the information needs of the searcher. The proposed models use implicit methods to unobtrusively monitor searcher interaction, make inferences about what constitutes relevant material, create new queries and choose appropriate retrieval strategies. Traditionally, to receive such support searchers must use relevance feedback systems and make a series of explicit assessments of what information is relevant. Such systems are unpopular since assessments are difficult to make, searchers must provide this feedback and the benefits are not always apparent.In our promising earlier research, we investigated the personalisation of the search results through the use of implicit feedback models. It was demonstrated that our techniques provide effective aids to interactive searching. However, our recent user studies have highlighted some inadequacies; that is, searchers still wished to retain control over some of the actions of the systems created, suggesting an incompleteness in the implicit techniques used. In this proposal we will make use of these results and investigate the development of robust adaptive search models based on implicit feedback. We will establish the factors that can act as implicit feedback, study the role of context in using these factors and develop structured presentation techniques. The creation of structured information spaces can enhance the quality of the interaction that these methods use to make their decisions. This interaction, as well as appropriate affective and contextual aspects will be used to build robust adaptive search models.Effective adaptive search models will alleviate many of the problems faced by users of the web search systems, and in particular, that of novice searchers. This project is scheduled for 16 months and the total budget requested is about 60K. This cost-effective project will allow us to continue our ground breaking research on the use of implicit feedback models.
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