Challenges and methods for retrieving domain specific information
Domain-specific information retrieval
Information Retrieval
Summary
People often search for information in specific professional or academic areas, not just on the general web. The authors explain that such searches can be more complicated because they involve long documents, detailed queries, and extended user needs. They review the unique challenges in these searches, including fairness and bias in search models. Their work also covers the models developed to address these issues and highlights that advances in specialized searches can help improve general web searches too.
What this means in practice
- •For legal tech developers: Use insights about handling long legal documents and queries to build better case search tools for law firms.
- •For digital library engineers: Improve retrieval systems for academic research by applying domain-specific user interaction models and handling extended search sessions.
A survey. It maps existing work.
Authors
Suzan Verberne, Florina Piroi, Allan Hanbury
Abstract
Information Retrieval (IR) is much more than ad hoc web search: a large portion of the information seeking activities takes place in specific domains, often addressing work-related tasks. Examples are lawyers finding relevant prior cases for a legal case and academic researchers studying the background material for a paper. In Chapter 2 we outline the most common domain-specific tasks, datasets and applications. Domain-specific IR has a number of challenges that make set it apart from simple web search tasks: they often deal with long documents, long queries and long sessions with specific user needs. We discuss these in Chapter 3. We also address issues related to bias and fairness of models. In Chapter 4, we describe the models and methods developed for domain-specific tasks and data, addressing the specific challenges, including user aspects related to domain-specific IR tasks, dealing with queries, user models, and user interactions. We show that many of the methodological advances in domain-specific IR are transferable to other domains and even to open-domain web search. We conclude with the main takeaways and propose research directions for the near future.