An attempt to enhance performance in user session based information retrieval

The ongoing surge in the amount of online information has made the process of accurate retrieval much more difficult. Providers of information retrieval systems have come under a lot of pressure to improve their techniques to cater for the modern user. Conventional systems are often limited as they fail to understand the true search intent of the user. This is usually a result of both poor query formulation by the user and an inability of the search engine to process the query adequately. In this paper, an approach is presented that attempts to learn a user’s short-term interests through the clustering of their search results. A profile is maintained for each user to assist in the process of context resolution for a given query. The details of such an approach and experimental results to evaluate its effectiveness are presented in this paper.