Research talk 2 - Modelling Interactive IR by Norbert Fuhr

Related slides: https://www.is.inf.uni-due.de/bib/pdf/talks/Fuhr_13ty.pdf

It’s a wonderful talk given by the Salton Award winner Norbert Fuhr. Speaking of interactive IR, my first reaction is about HCI. As an expert in probabilistic information retrieval, Norbert interpreters this problem in a probabilistic manner.

Modelling Interactive IR by Norbert Fuhr, lecture at ASIRF 2016

He assumes that the search behavior of a user consists of a series of actions, which are provided by the system. User may evaluate these possible actions and perform one of them, as only positive decisions are of benefit for a user. In this way, users’ search behavior can be modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). And accordingly we can embed users’ session information into ranking.