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Università degli studi di Udine Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica
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Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory
Intelligent Information Retrieval Group
Goals
Intelligent Information Retrieval (IIR) is the intersection of the
areas of Information Retrieval (IR) and Artificial Intelligence
(AI). It aims at improving the performance of an IR system by means of
AI techniques. In this scenario, the following activities take place
in our AI laboratory:
- FIRE Implementation
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The FIRE prototype, whose main goal is to emulate some of the
functions of a human intermediary when accessing a boolean IR system,
has been developed and is currently being improved. FIRE capabilities
are accomplished through AI techniques: explicit reasoning and
representation of knowledge about the intermediary skills and about
the subject domain are used by a knowledge-based module included in
FIRE. Thus FIRE is an intelligent interface to an IR system, a
particular instance of an IIR system.
- FIRE evaluation
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The FIRE prototype has recently been evaluated, in collaboration with
researchers at the Department of Psychology of the University of
Trieste. Evaluating intelligent interfaces to IR systems is a complex
activity and evaluation methodologies that go beyond the classical
precision and recall figures are not well established. In this line of
research we propose an approach to the evaluation of an intelligent
interface that covers also the user-system interaction and measures
user's satisfaction. More specifically, we exploited an experiment
that evaluates: (i) the added value of the semi-automatic query
reformulation implemented in FIRE; (ii) the importance of technical,
terminological, and strategic supports and (iii) the best way to
provide them. The interpretation of results lead to guidelines for the
design of user interfaces to IR systems and to some observations on
the evaluation issue.
- Cognitive-epistemic modelling of the IR
activity
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The lackness of a formal account is probably one of the most evident
of the shortcomings of IR: concepts like information, information
need, and relevance are neither well understood nor formally defined.
A cognitive framework, that permits to analyze these three central
concepts of the IR scenario, has been proposed and is currently being
revised.
- Understanding the nature of relevance
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Notwithstanding its importance, and the huge amounts of research on
this topic in the past, relevance is not yet a well understood
concept, also because of an inconsistently used terminology. This
issue can be clarified by a classification of the various kinds of
relevance. It is shown that: (i) there are many kinds of relevance,
not just one; (ii) these kinds can be classified in a formally defined
four dimensional space; (iii) such classification helps us to
understand the nature of relevance and relevance judgement and can be
used for handling the huge literature on this subject and for
analyzing the design and evaluation of IR systems.
Results
MAIN PUBLICATIONS:
- Brajnik, G., Guida, G., and Tasso, C. User Modeling in Expert
Man-Machine Interfaces: A Case Study in Intelligent Information
Retrieval. IEEE Transaction on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
, 20(1), 1990, pp. 166-185.
- Brajnik, G., Mizzaro, S., and Tasso, C. Interfacce intelligenti
a banche di dati bibliografici. In D. Saccà, editor,
Sistemi evoluti per basi di dati, Franco Angeli, Milano, I,
1995, pp. 95-128. In Italian. Translation of the title: "Intelligent
interfaces for bibliographic databases". Postscript-gzipped
version here
- Brajnik, G., Mizzaro, S., and Tasso, C. Evaluating user
interfaces to information retrieval systems: A case study on user
support. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR'96,
Zurich, CH, August 18-22, 1996, pp. 128-136. Text-only
abstract here Postscript-gzipped
version here
- Mizzaro, S. A cognitive analisys of information retrieval. In
P. Ingwersen and N. O. Pors, editors, Information
Science: Integration in Perspective -- Proceedings of CoLIS2,
Copenhagen, D, October 1996, pp. 233-250. The Royal School of
Librarianship. Paper awarded with the "CoLIS2 Young
Scientist Award", a prize for the best paper presented in this
conference by a young researcher". Text-only
abstract here Postscript-gzipped
version here
- Mizzaro, S. Il Reperimento delle informazioni: analisi
teorica e sperimentazione. Phd thesis in Engineering of
Information, University of Trieste (Italy), February 1997. In
Italian. The translation of the title is "Information retrieval:
theoretical analysis and experimentation". Postscript-gzipped version here (1.1
MBytes)
- Mizzaro, S. Relevance: The whole history. Journal of the
American Society for Information Science, 48(9), September 1997,
pp. 810-832. Text-only abstract
here
- Mizzaro, S. How many relevances in information retrieval?
Interacting With Computers, 1998. In press. Paper awarded
with the Informer (British Computer Society IR Group newsletter) "Best
Student Paper in IR", a prize for the best paper published in the
period 1st November 1996 - 1st November 1997 by an European
student. Text-only
abstract here. A previous version is available as Research Report
UDMI/02/97/RR, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science,
University of Udine.
Principal Investigators
Projects
Events
Research Partnership
- Department of Psychology of the University of Trieste (Danilo FUM).
Prototype
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