Collaborative Retrieval Systems

Collaborative search generally uses previously collected search sessions as a resource to help future users to improve their searching by query modification. The recommendation or automatic extension of the query is generally based on the content of the old sessions, or purely the sequence/order of queries/ texts in a session, or a combination. However, users with the same expressed query may need different information. The difference may not be topic related. This chapter proposes to enrich the context of query representation to incorporate non-topical properties of user information needs, which the authors believe will improve the results of collaborative search.