Our research focuses on building representative user models of the long-term and evolving information needs expressed through human-computer interactions during Web search sessions. The implicit and explicit interactions are considered to represent the intentions driving a person’s information needs and their behaviours are used to model their intentions. Multiple-aspect user models are created and maintained based on these actions and are used to retrieve new information on behalf of the people they represent to attempt to assist them with the ongoing search tasks.

I recently presented a paper at the Contextual Information Access, Retrieval, and Evaluation Workshop at the 31st European Conference on Information Retrieval in Toulouse, France. It was quite a challenging experience to present my work in 15 minutes so I chose to focus on the evaluation challenges of multi-session experiments in interactive information retrieval.

We are currently investigating and experimenting with evaluation methodologies for multiple-session retrieval processes and hope to publish our progress soon.