A Re-classification of Information Seeking Tasks and Their Computational Solutions

Abstract

This article presents a re-classification of information seeking (IS) tasks, concepts, and algorithms. The proposed taxonomy provides new dimensions to look into information seeking tasks and methods. The new dimensions include the number of search iterations, search goal types, and procedures to reach these goals. Differences along these dimensions for the information seeking tasks call for suitable computational solutions. The article then reviews machine learning solutions that match each new category. The paper ends with a review of evaluation campaigns for IS systems.

Accepted to ACM TOIS in Nov 2021