Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval: Techniques and Evaluation

Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval refers to systems that support multiple users searching together at the same time in order to satisfy a shared information need. To date most SCIR systems have focussed on providing various awareness tools in order to enable collaborating users to coordinate the search task. However, requiring users to both search and coordinate the group activity may prove too demanding. On the other hand without effective coordination policies the group search may not be effective. In this paper we propose and evaluate novel system-mediated techniques for coordinating a group search. These techniques allow for an effective division of labour across the group whereby each group member can explore a subset of the search space. We also propose and evaluate techniques to support automated sharing of knowledge across searchers in SCIR, through novel collaborative and complementary relevance feedback techniques. In order to evaluate these techniques, we pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ECIR
• Authors: Colum Foley, Alan F. Smeaton
• Keywords: Computer Science, ECIR 2009, SCIR Evaluation, SCIR Systems, TREC Interactive Search