Evaluation metrics such as precision, recall and normalized discounted cumulative gain have been widely applied in ad hoc retrieval experiments. They have facilitated the assessment of system performance in various topics over the past decade. ...

A key application of conversational search is refining a user’s search intent by asking a series of clarification questions, aiming to improve the relevance of search results. Training and evaluating such conversational systems currently requires ...

User interactions in Web search, in particular, clicks, provide valuable hints on document relevance; but the signals are very noisy. In order to better understand user click behaviors and to infer the implied relevance, various click models have ...

Query recommendation has long been considered a key feature of search engines, which can improve users’ search experience by providing useful query suggestions for their search tasks. Most existing approaches on query recommendation aim to ...

The internet is an important source of medical knowledge for everyone, from laypeople to medical professionals. We investigate how these two extremes, in terms of user groups, have distinct needs and exhibit significantly different search ...

The majority of Internet users search for medical information online; however, many do not have an adequate medical vocabulary. Users might have difficulties finding the most authoritative and useful information because they are unfamiliar with ...

The increasing use of mobile devices enables an information retrieval (IR) system to capitalize on various types of contexts (e.g., temporal and geographical information) about its users. Combined with the user preference history recorded in the ...

In the field of information retrieval (IR), researchers and practitioners are often faced with a demand for valid approaches to evaluate the performance of retrieval systems. The Cranfield experiment paradigm has been dominant for the in-vitro ...

The study of information retrieval (IR) has increased in interest and importance with the explosive growth of online information in recent years. Learning about IR within formal courses of study enables users of search engines to use them more ...

We present an innovative approach to Web search, called collaborative search, that seeks to cope with the type of vague queries that are commonplace in Web search. We do this by leveraging the search behaviour of previous searchers to personalize ...