Foundations of Contextual IR
Abstract: To overcome the “one size fits all” behavior of most search engines, in recent years a great deal of research has addressed the problem of defining techniques aimed at tailoring the search outcome to the user context in order to improve the quality of search. The main idea is to produce context-dependent and user-tailored search results. Search tasks are subjective and often complex. The user-system interaction, based on keyword-based querying and on the presentation of search results as a list of Web pages ordered according to their estimated relevance, is often unsatisfactory. This lecture will present an overview of the main issues related to contextual search.
Short Bio: Gabriella Pasi is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication (DISCo) of the University of Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy. Within DISCo she leads the Information Retrieval Lab. Her main research activities are related to Information Retrieval, Information Filtering and Decision Support. In recent years she has addressed the issues of contextual search and user modelling. She is also conducting research activities related to the analysis of user generated content on social media. She has published more than 250 papers on International Journals and Books, and on the Proceedings of International Conferences. She is involved in several activities for the evaluation of research; in particular, she was appointed as an expert of the Computer Science panel for the Starting Grants and Consolidator Grants of the Programme Ideas at the European Research Council. She is Associate Editor and member of the Editorial Board of several international journals, and she has delivered several keynote talks/plenary lectures at international conferences related to her research interests. She has participated to the organization of several International events, in both roles of organization and program chair.