The position in this project is no longer available.
Searching for information is in most cases, particularly in a professional environment, triggered by a lack of knowledge. That means, the user initiates the process in order to find something out rather than to be entertained, for examples. In such professional environments we also, typically, have information about the domain-specific information already available to the user (through business-related communications and documents). Therefore, in this project we want to investigate novel information retrieval models based not solely on the similarity between the linguistic expression of an information need and the content of indexed documents, but also, and primarily, on the difference between the knowledge model of the user and that of the indexed collection. A new formal definition of a user's knowledge, based on the merging of statistical, latent, and explicit semantics is therefore needed.
Main outcome: