On Using Social Context to Model Information Retrieval and Collaboration in Scientific Research Community - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 135

6.2 From Personal Context to Social Context in Information
Retrieval
The notion of context has a long history in multiple computer science applications
[ 5 , 6 ]. It is a core concept that has been addressed mainly in user modeling, artificial
intelligence, adaptive hypermedia, information retrieval, and ubiquitous comput-
ing. It is a wide and difficult notion that does not have one definition that can cover
all the aspects it refers to. We shall basically define context as: “ any knowledge or
elementary information characterizing the surrounding application (user, objects,
interactions) and having an important relationship with the application itself ”.
In this chapter, we focus on context in information retrieval area. In information
retrieval applications, context refers to the whole data, metadata, applications, and
cognitive structures embedded in situations of retrieval or information seeking
and having an impact on the user's behavior in general and relevance assessment
in particular. Intuitively, user-system interaction constitutes a rich repository of
potential information about preferences, experience and knowledge, as well as
interests [ 3 ]. This information repository represents a context of interaction , viewed
as source of evidence that could allow retrieval systems to better capture user's
information needs and to more accurately measure the relevance of the delivered
information. In other words, the system's estimation of the relevance would rely not
only on the results of query-document matching but also on the user's context-
document adequacy. This has challenged the design of contextual information
retrieval systems with regard to the definition of relevant dimensions of context
and the specification of methods and strategies dealing with these aspects in order to
improve the search performance [ 7 ]. One of the fundamental research questions
here is: which context dimensions should be considered in the retrieval process?
Several studies proposed a specification of context within and across application
domains [ 8 , 9 ].
Prior works in contextual information retrieval [ 3 ] focused on using personal
context to personalize the information retrieval process. Personal context refers
mainly to the user's specific preferences, background, location, etc. However, with
the prominence of online social media tools, many studies proved that interaction
and collaboration among the users is an appropriate source of evidence allowing the
users' information needs to be better met. In the following paragraphs, we present
an overview of works that use either personal context or social context as part of the
process of information seeking and retrieval.
6.2.1 On Using Personal Context in Information Retrieval:
Toward Personalized Information Retrieval
Personal context could be characterized by five context factors summarized as:
[ 10 ]: