Context-sensitive information retrieval using implicit feedback

A major limitation of most existing retrieval models and systems is that the retrieval decision is made based solely on the query and document collection; information about the actual user and search context is largely ignored. In this paper, we study how to exploit implicit feedback information, including previous queries and clickthrough information, to improve retrieval accuracy in an interactive information retrieval setting. We propose several context-sensitive retrieval algorithms based on statistical language models to combine the preceding queries and clicked document summaries with the current query for better ranking of documents. We use the TREC AP data to create a test collection with search context information, and quantitatively evaluate our models using this test set. Experiment results show that using implicit feedback, especially the clicked document summaries, can improve retrieval performance substantially.