Informationssökningar av olika slag sker dagligen världen över och sökresultatet kan många gånger vara så stort att användarna har svårt att veta vilka sökresultat som är relevanta. I denna uppsats har syftet varit att undersöka hur sökresultat kan filtreras och sorteras med hjälp av platsbaserad sökning för att det ska bli mer relevant för användaren. Genom litteraturstudie och intervjuer har det blivit möjligt att ta reda på hur ett sökresultat skulle kunna filtreras och sorteras för att möta användarnas förväntningar. De teorier och slutsatser som framkom tillämpades vid utvecklingen av en prototyp. Prototypen testades och utvärderades sedan genom ett användartest där resultatet visar att filtreringen och sorteringen som används i studien kan göra sökresultatet mer relevant för användaren. / Information searches of various kinds take place daily around the world and search results can often be so large that users have difficulty knowing which results are relevant. In this paper the aim has been to examine how search results can be filtered and sorted by using location-based search to make the results more relevant to the user. Through a literature review and interviews it was possible to investigate how a search result can be filtered and sorted to meet user expectations. The theories and conclusions that emerged were applied in the development of a prototype. Usability tests were performed on the prototype and the results show that the filtering used in the study can provide a more relevant search result.

La tecnología actual de los almacenes de datos y las técnicas OLAP permite a las organizaciones analizar los datos estructurados que éstas recopilan en sus bases de datos. Las circunstancias que rodean a estos datos aparecen descritas en documentos, típicamente ricos en texto. Esta información sobre el contexto de los datos registrados el almacén es muy valiosa, ya que nos permite interpretar el resultado obtenido en análisis históricos. Por ejemplo, la crisis financiera relatada una revista digital sobre economía podría explicar una caída de las ventas en una determinada región. Sin embargo, no es posible explotar esta información contextual utilizando directamente las herramientas OLAP tradicionales. La principal causa es la naturaleza no-estructurada, rica en texto, de los documentos que recogen dicha información. Esta tesis presenta el almacén contextualizado: un nuevo tipo de sistema de apoyo a la decisión que combina las tecnologías de los almacenes de datos y los sistemas de recuperación de la información para integrar las fuentes de información estructurada y de documentos de una organización, y analizar estos datos bajo distintos contextos.

With a growing amount of subjective content distributed across the Web, there is a need for a domain-independent information retrieval system that would support ad hoc retrieval of documents expressing opinions on a specific topic of the user’s query. While the research area of opinion detection and sentiment analysis has received much attention in the recent years, little research has been done on identifying subjective content targeted at a specific topic, i.e. expressing topical opinion. This thesis presents a novel method for ad hoc retrieval of documents which contain subjective content on the topic of the query. Documents are ranked by the likelihood each document expresses an opinion on a query term, approximated as the likelihood any occurrence of the query term is modified by a subjective adjective. Domain-independent user-based evaluation of the proposed methods was conducted, and shows statistically significant gains over Google ranking as the baseline.

As the Web has become more and more important to our daily lives, algorithms that can effectively utilize the link structure have become more and more important. One such task has been to find communities in social network data. Recently, however, there has been increased interest in augmenting links with additional semantic information. We examine link classification from the point of view of scientometrics, with an eye towards applying what has been learned about scientific citation to Web linking. Some community detection algorithms are reviewed, and one that has been developed for topical community finding on the Web is adapted to typed scientific citations.

While many users have relatively general information needs, users who are familiar with a certain topic may have more specific or complex information needs. Such users already have some knowledge of a subject and its concepts, and they need to find information on a specific aspect of a certain entity, such as its cause, effect, and relationships between entities. To successfully resolve this kind of complex information needs, in our study, we investigated the effectiveness of topic-independent query templates as a tool for assisting users in articulating their information needs. A set of query templates, which were written in the form of fill-in-the-blanks was designed to represent general semantic relationships between concepts, such as cause-effect and problem-solution. To conduct the research, we designed a control interface with a single query textbox and an experimental interface with the query templates. A user study was performed with 30 users. Okapi information retrieval system was used to retrieve documents in response to the users’ queries. The analysis in this paper indicates that while users found the template-based query formulation less easy to use, the queries written using templates performed better than the queries written using the control interface with one query textbox. Our analysis of a group of users and some specific topics demonstrates that the experimental interface tended to help users create more detailed search queries and the users were able to think about different aspects of their complex information needs and fill in many templates. In the future, an interesting research direction would be to tune the templates, adapting them to users’ specific query requests and avoiding showing non-relevant templates to users by automatically selecting related templates from a larger set of templates.

While many users have relatively general information needs, users who are familiar with a certain topic may have more specific or complex information needs. Such users already have some knowledge of a subject and its concepts, and they need to find information on a specific aspect of a certain entity, such as its cause, effect, and relationships between entities. To successfully resolve this kind of complex information needs, in our study, we investigated the effectiveness of topic-independent query templates as a tool for assisting users in articulating their information needs. A set of query templates, which were written in the form of fill-in-the-blanks was designed to represent general semantic relationships between concepts, such as cause-effect and problem-solution. To conduct the research, we designed a control interface with a single query textbox and an experimental interface with the query templates. A user study was performed with 30 users. Okapi information retrieval system was used to retrieve documents in response to the users’ queries. The analysis in this paper indicates that while users found the template-based query formulation less easy to use, the queries written using templates performed better than the queries written using the control interface with one query textbox. Our analysis of a group of users and some specific topics demonstrates that the experimental interface tended to help users create more detailed search queries and the users were able to think about different aspects of their complex information needs and fill in many templates. In the future, an interesting research direction would be to tune the templates, adapting them to users’ specific query requests and avoiding showing non-relevant templates to users by automatically selecting related templates from a larger set of templates.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how high school students (age 13 to 19) search for information on the web and in databases. Furthermore, it aims to look into how critical of sources they are. The questions asked was: how the students search for information in digital media? Which kind of sources do the students use? How they evaluate the information they find? Do they get any education in information retrieval and source evaluation? To answer these questions students were interviewed in groups about their information retrieval behavior. Furthermore two school librarians were interviewed about their experience of the students’ information retrieval.During the interviews it was clear that the students had received quite sparse instructions on the subjects of information retrieval and criticism of the sources. Some students did not even know what the latter was. Their methods for information retrieval were quite simple and, especially in the case of the younger students, without much thought behind. Their main strategy seemed to be Google and Wikipedia.From the interviews with the school librarian I learned that one of the reasons the students do not receive instructions in the above mentioned subjects is the lack of interest from the teachers. The librarians thought that the solution was to build up a stronger relationship with the teachers.

With a growing amount of subjective content distributed across the Web, there is a need for a domain-independent information retrieval system that would support ad hoc retrieval of documents expressing opinions on a specific topic of the user’s query. While the research area of opinion detection and sentiment analysis has received much attention in the recent years, little research has been done on identifying subjective content targeted at a specific topic, i.e. expressing topical opinion. This thesis presents a novel method for ad hoc retrieval of documents which contain subjective content on the topic of the query. Documents are ranked by the likelihood each document expresses an opinion on a query term, approximated as the likelihood any occurrence of the query term is modified by a subjective adjective. Domain-independent user-based evaluation of the proposed methods was conducted, and shows statistically significant gains over Google ranking as the baseline.

As the Web has become more and more important to our daily lives, algorithms that can effectively utilize the link structure have become more and more important. One such task has been to find communities in social network data. Recently, however, there has been increased interest in augmenting links with additional semantic information. We examine link classification from the point of view of scientometrics, with an eye towards applying what has been learned about scientific citation to Web linking. Some community detection algorithms are reviewed, and one that has been developed for topical community finding on the Web is adapted to typed scientific citations.

While many users have relatively general information needs, users who are familiar with a certain topic may have more specific or complex information needs. Such users already have some knowledge of a subject and its concepts, and they need to find information on a specific aspect of a certain entity, such as its cause, effect, and relationships between entities. To successfully resolve this kind of complex information needs, in our study, we investigated the effectiveness of topic-independent query templates as a tool for assisting users in articulating their information needs. A set of query templates, which were written in the form of fill-in-the-blanks was designed to represent general semantic relationships between concepts, such as cause-effect and problem-solution. To conduct the research, we designed a control interface with a single query textbox and an experimental interface with the query templates. A user study was performed with 30 users. Okapi information retrieval system was used to retrieve documents in response to the users’ queries. The analysis in this paper indicates that while users found the template-based query formulation less easy to use, the queries written using templates performed better than the queries written using the control interface with one query textbox. Our analysis of a group of users and some specific topics demonstrates that the experimental interface tended to help users create more detailed search queries and the users were able to think about different aspects of their complex information needs and fill in many templates. In the future, an interesting research direction would be to tune the templates, adapting them to users’ specific query requests and avoiding showing non-relevant templates to users by automatically selecting related templates from a larger set of templates.