Searching in the Context of a Task: A Review of Methods and Tools

Contextual information extracted from the user task can help to better target retrieval to task-relevant content. In particular, topical context can be exploited to identify the subject of the information needs, contributing to reduce the information overload problem. A great number of methods exist to extract raw context data and contextual interaction patterns from the user task and to model this information using higher-level representations. Context can then be used as a source for automatic query generation, or as a means to refine or disambiguate user-generated queries. It can also be used to filter and rank results as well as to select domain-specific search engines with better capabilities to satisfy specific information requests. This article reviews methods that have been applied to deal with the problem of reflecting the current and long-term interests of a user in the search process. It discusses major difficulties encountered in the research area of context-based information retrieval and presents an overview of tools proposed since the mid-nineties to deal with the problem of context-based search.