There are many tasks that require information finding. Some can be largely automated, and others greatly benefit from successful interaction between system and searcher. We are interested in the task of answering questions where some synthesis of information is required-the answer would not generally be given from a single passage of a single document. We investigate whether variation in the way a list of documents is delivered affected searcher performance in the question answering task. We will show that there is a significant difference in performance using a list customized to the task type, compared with a standard web-engine list. This indicates that paying attention to the task and the searcher interaction may provide substantial improvement in task performance.

Article Free Access Share on The role of a judge in a user based retrieval experiment (poster session) Authors: Mingfang Wu CSIRO Mathematical and Information Science and Department of Computer Science, RMIT CSIRO Mathematical and Information Science and Department of Computer Science, RMITView Profile , Michael Fuller Department of Computer Science, RMIT Department of Computer Science, RMITView Profile , Ross Wilkinson CSIRO Mathematical and Information Science CSIRO Mathematical and Information ScienceView Profile Authors Info & Claims SIGIR '00: Proceedings of the 23rd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrievalJuly 2000Pages 331–333https://doi.org/10.1145/345508.345628Published:01 July 2000Publication History 1citation19DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Downloads19Last 12 Months2Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Describes the data model that is used to implement the SIM content management server (CMS), an SGML/XML-native content server that is designed to support extremely fast data access to and dynamic updating of 100-GByte collections under high loads. This paper describes the requirements for supporting text-intensive applications and for building XML/SGML document management solutions. The SIM CMS employs a data model that is designed to directly support SGML and XML; this model is described, and a comparison with other models based on general-purpose database management systems is made.

There is a simple method for integrating information retrieval and hypertext. This consists of treating nodes as isolated documents and retrieving them in order of similarity. If the nodes are structured, in particular, if sets of nodes collectively constitute documents, we can do better. This paper shows how the formation of the hypertext, the retrieval of nodes in response to content based queries, and the presentation of the nodes can be achieved in a way that exploits the knowledge encoded as the structure of the documents. The ideas are then exemplified in an SGML based hypertext information retrieval system.