Evidence Based Practice (EBP) is a relatively new approach that professionals are using to cope with the ever-growing body of literature in their fields. The goal of EBP is to effectively use this body of literature to improve professional practice, thus improving the quality of services. A major component of EBP is asking a focused, well-built question, referred to in this paper as an Evidence Based Practice Question (EBPQ). This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study that examines the use an EBPQ to respond to reference questions emailed to a university library reference desk. A purposive sample of 30 randomly selected reference emails was divided into two groups, the EBPQ group and the control group. The professional searcher who conducted the searches used the same approach in responding to each emailed reference question, except that the EBPQ group searches were guided by EBPQs, and the control group’s responses were not. The results indicate that searches guided by using EBPQs are more focused, apply more resources to the search process, and take less time than searches not guided by using EBPQs. These conclusions suggest that EBPQs appear to be useful for improving that search process and that further research is warranted.

Systems trained on linguistically annotated data achieve strong performance for many language processing tasks. This encourages the idea that annotations can improve any language processing task if applied in the right way. However, despite widespread acceptance and availability of highly accurate parsing software, it is not clear that ad hoc information retrieval (IR) techniques using annotated documents and requests consistently improve search performance compared to techniques that use no linguistic knowledge. In many cases, retrieval gains made using language processing components, such as part-of-speech tagging and head-dependent relations, are offset by significant negative effects. This results in a minimal positive, or even negative, overall impact for linguistically motivated approaches compared to approaches that do not use any syntactic or domain knowledge. In some cases, it may be that syntax does not reveal anything of practical importance about document relevance. Yet without a convincing explanation for why linguistic annotations fail in IR, the intuitive appeal of search systems that ‘understand’ text can result in the repeated application, and mis-application, of language processing to enhance search performance. This dissertation investigates whether linguistics can improve the selection of query terms by better modelling the alignment process between natural language requests and search queries. It is the most comprehensive work on the utility of linguistic methods in IR to date. Term selection in this work focuses on identification of informative query terms of 1-3 words that both represent the semantics of a request and discriminate between relevant and non-relevant documents. Approaches to word association are discussed with respect to linguistic principles, and evaluated with respect to semantic characterization and discriminative ability. Analysis is organised around three theories of language that emphasize different structures for the identification of terms: phrase structure theory, dependency theory and lexicalism. The structures identified by these theories play distinctive roles in the organisation of language. Evidence is presented regarding the value of different methods of word association based on these structures, and the effect of method and term combinations. Two highly effective, novel methods for the selection of terms from verbose queries are also proposed and evaluated. The first method focuses on the semantic phenomenon of ellipsis with a discriminative filter that leverages diverse text features. The second method exploits a term ranking algorithm, PhRank, that uses no linguistic information and relies on a network model of query context. The latter focuses queries so that 1-5 terms in an unweighted model achieve better retrieval effectiveness than weighted IR models that use up to 30 terms. In addition, unlike models that use a weighted distribution of terms or subqueries, the concise terms identified by PhRank are interpretable by users. Evaluation with newswire and web collections demonstrates that PhRank-based query reformulation significantly improves performance of verbose queries up to 14% compared to highly competitive IR models, and is at least as good for short, keyword queries with the same models. Results illustrate that linguistic processing may help with the selection of word associations but does not necessarily translate into improved IR performance. Statistical methods are necessary to overcome the limits of syntactic parsing and word adjacency measures for ad hoc IR. As a result, probabilistic frameworks that discover, and make use of, many forms of linguistic evidence may deliver small improvements in IR effectiveness, but methods that use simple features can be substantially more efficient and equally, or more, effective. Various explanations for this finding are suggested, including the probabilistic nature of grammatical categories, a lack of homomorphism between syntax and semantics, the impact of lexical relations, variability in collection data, and systemic effects in language systems.

Contextual information retrieval (CIR) is a critical technique for today’s search engines in terms of facilitating queries and returning relevant information. Despite its importance, little progress has been made in its application, due to the difficulty of capturing and representing contextual information about users. This thesis details the development and evaluation of the contextual SERL search, designed to tackle some of the challenges associated with CIR from the World Wide Web. The contextual SERL search utilises a rich contextual model that exploits implicit and explicit data to modify queries to more accurately reflect the user’s interests as well as to continually build the user’s contextual profile and a shared contextual knowledge base. These profiles are used to filter results from a standard search engine to improve the relevance of the pages displayed to the user. The contextual SERL search has been tested in an observational study that has captured both qualitative and quantitative data about the ability of the framework to improve the user’s web search experience. A total of 30 subjects, with different levels of search experience, participated in the observational study experiment. The results demonstrate that when the contextual profile and the shared contextual knowledge base are used, the contextual SERL search improves search effectiveness, efficiency and subjective satisfaction. The effectiveness improves as subjects have actually entered fewer queries to reach the target information in comparison to the contemporary search engine. In the case of a particularly complex search task, the efficiency improves as subjects have browsed fewer hits, visited fewer URLs, made fewer clicks and have taken less time to reach the target information when compared to the contemporary search engine. Finally, subjects have expressed a higher degree of satisfaction on the quality of contextual support when using the shared contextual knowledge base in comparison to using their contextual profile. These results suggest that integration of a user’s contextual factors and information seeking behaviours are very important for successful development of the CIR framework. It is believed that this framework and other similar projects will help provide the basis for the next generation of contextual information retrieval from the Web.

Contextual information retrieval (CIR) is a critical technique for today’s search engines in terms of facilitating queries and returning relevant information. Despite its importance, little progress has been made in its application, due to the difficulty of capturing and representing contextual information about users. This thesis details the development and evaluation of the contextual SERL search, designed to tackle some of the challenges associated with CIR from the World Wide Web. The contextual SERL search utilises a rich contextual model that exploits implicit and explicit data to modify queries to more accurately reflect the user’s interests as well as to continually build the user’s contextual profile and a shared contextual knowledge base. These profiles are used to filter results from a standard search engine to improve the relevance of the pages displayed to the user. The contextual SERL search has been tested in an observational study that has captured both qualitative and quantitative data about the ability of the framework to improve the user’s web search experience. A total of 30 subjects, with different levels of search experience, participated in the observational study experiment. The results demonstrate that when the contextual profile and the shared contextual knowledge base are used, the contextual SERL search improves search effectiveness, efficiency and subjective satisfaction. The effectiveness improves as subjects have actually entered fewer queries to reach the target information in comparison to the contemporary search engine. In the case of a particularly complex search task, the efficiency improves as subjects have browsed fewer hits, visited fewer URLs, made fewer clicks and have taken less time to reach the target information when compared to the contemporary search engine. Finally, subjects have expressed a higher degree of satisfaction on the quality of contextual support when using the shared contextual knowledge base in comparison to using their contextual profile. These results suggest that integration of a user’s contextual factors and information seeking behaviours are very important for successful development of the CIR framework. It is believed that this framework and other similar projects will help provide the basis for the next generation of contextual information retrieval from the Web.

O objetivo deste trabalho é, através do estudo de diversas tecnologias, desenvolver o protótipo de uma ferramenta capaz de oferecer suporte ao usuário na formulacdo de uma consulta a MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System On Line). A MEDLINE é um sistema de recuperação de informações bibliográficas, na área da biomedicina, desenvolvida pela National Library of Medicine. Ela é uma ferramenta cuja utilizando tem sido ampliada nesta área em decorrência do aumento da utilizando de literatura, disponível eletronicamente, por profissionais da área da saúde. As pessoas, em geral, buscam informação e esperam encontrá-la exatamente de acordo com as suas expectativas, de forma ágil e utilizando todas as fontes de recursos disponíveis. Foi com este propósito que surgiram os primeiros Sistema de Recuperação de Informação (SRI) onde, de forma simplificada, um usuário constrói uma consulta, a qual expressa sua necessidade de informação, em seguida o sistema a processa e os resultados obtidas através dela retornam ao usuário. Grande parte dos usuários encontram dificuldades em representar a sua necessidade de informação de forma a obter resultados satisfatórios em um SRI. Os termos que o usuário escolhe para compor a consulta nem sempre são os mesmos que o sistema reconhece. A fim de que um usuário seja bem sucedido na definição dos termos que compõem a sua consulta é aconselhável que ele conheça a terminologia que foi empregada na indexação dos itens que ele deseja recuperar ou que possa contar com um intermediário que possua esse conhecimento. Em situações em que nenhuma dessas possibilidades seja verdadeira recursos que viabilizem uma consulta bem sucedida se fazem necessários. Este trabalho, inicialmente, apresenta um estudo geral sobre os Sistemas de Recuperação de Informações (SRI), enfocando todos os processos envolvidos e relacionados ao armazenamento, organização e a própria recuperação. Posteriormente, são destacados aspectos relacionados aos vocabulários e classificações medicas em uso, os quais serão Úteis para uma maior compreensão das dificuldades encontradas pelos usuários durante a interação com um sistema com esta finalidade. E, finalmente, é apresentado o protótipo do Sistema para Formulação de Consultas a MEDLINE, bem como seus componentes e funcionalidades. O Sistema para Formulação de Consultas a MEDLINE foi desenvolvido com o intuito de permitir que o usuário utilize qualquer termo na formulação de uma consulta destinada a MEDLINE. Ele possibilita a integração de diferentes terminologias médicas, originárias de vocabulários e classificações disponíveis em língua portuguesa e atualmente em uso. Esta abordagem permite a criação de uma terminologia biomédica mais completa, sendo que cada termo mantém relacionamentos, os quais descrevem a sua semântica, com outros. / The goal of this work is, through the study of many technologies, to develop the prototype of a tool able to offer support to the user in query formulation to the MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System On Line). The MEDLINE is a bibliographical information retrieval system in the biomedicine area developed by National Library of Medicine. It is a tool whose usefulness has been amplifyed in this area by the increase of literature utilization, eletronically available, by health care profissionals. People, in general, look for information and are interested in finding it exactly like their expectations, in an agile way and using every single information source available. With this purpouse the first Information Retrieval System (IRS ) emerged, where in a simplifyed way, a user defines a query, that expresses an information necessity and, one step ahead, the system processes it and returns to the user answers from the query. Most of the users think is difficult to represent their information necessity in order to be succesful in searching an IRS. The terms that the user selects to compose the query are not always the same that the system recognizes. In order to be successfull in the definition of the terms that will compose his/her query is advisable that the user know the terminology that was employed in the indexing process of the wanted items or that he/she can have an intermediary person who knows about it. In many situations where no one of these possibilities can be true, resources that make a successfull query possible will be needed. This work, firstly, presents a general study on IRS focusing all the process involved and related to the storage, organization and retrieval. Lately, aspects related to the medical classifications and vocabulary are emphasized, which will be usefull for a largest comprehension of the difficulties found by users during interaction with a system like this. And, finally, the prototype of the Query Formulation System to MEDLINE is presented, as well as its components and funcionalities. The Query Formulation System to MEDLINE was developed with the intention of allowing the user to use any term in the formulation of a query to the MEDLINE. It allows the integration of different medical terminologies originated from classifications and vocabulary available in Portuguese language and in use today. This approach permits the creation of a more complete biomedical terminology in which each term maintains relationships that describe its semantic.

O objetivo deste trabalho é, através do estudo de diversas tecnologias, desenvolver o protótipo de uma ferramenta capaz de oferecer suporte ao usuário na formulacdo de uma consulta a MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System On Line). A MEDLINE é um sistema de recuperação de informações bibliográficas, na área da biomedicina, desenvolvida pela National Library of Medicine. Ela é uma ferramenta cuja utilizando tem sido ampliada nesta área em decorrência do aumento da utilizando de literatura, disponível eletronicamente, por profissionais da área da saúde. As pessoas, em geral, buscam informação e esperam encontrá-la exatamente de acordo com as suas expectativas, de forma ágil e utilizando todas as fontes de recursos disponíveis. Foi com este propósito que surgiram os primeiros Sistema de Recuperação de Informação (SRI) onde, de forma simplificada, um usuário constrói uma consulta, a qual expressa sua necessidade de informação, em seguida o sistema a processa e os resultados obtidas através dela retornam ao usuário. Grande parte dos usuários encontram dificuldades em representar a sua necessidade de informação de forma a obter resultados satisfatórios em um SRI. Os termos que o usuário escolhe para compor a consulta nem sempre são os mesmos que o sistema reconhece. A fim de que um usuário seja bem sucedido na definição dos termos que compõem a sua consulta é aconselhável que ele conheça a terminologia que foi empregada na indexação dos itens que ele deseja recuperar ou que possa contar com um intermediário que possua esse conhecimento. Em situações em que nenhuma dessas possibilidades seja verdadeira recursos que viabilizem uma consulta bem sucedida se fazem necessários. Este trabalho, inicialmente, apresenta um estudo geral sobre os Sistemas de Recuperação de Informações (SRI), enfocando todos os processos envolvidos e relacionados ao armazenamento, organização e a própria recuperação. Posteriormente, são destacados aspectos relacionados aos vocabulários e classificações medicas em uso, os quais serão Úteis para uma maior compreensão das dificuldades encontradas pelos usuários durante a interação com um sistema com esta finalidade. E, finalmente, é apresentado o protótipo do Sistema para Formulação de Consultas a MEDLINE, bem como seus componentes e funcionalidades. O Sistema para Formulação de Consultas a MEDLINE foi desenvolvido com o intuito de permitir que o usuário utilize qualquer termo na formulação de uma consulta destinada a MEDLINE. Ele possibilita a integração de diferentes terminologias médicas, originárias de vocabulários e classificações disponíveis em língua portuguesa e atualmente em uso. Esta abordagem permite a criação de uma terminologia biomédica mais completa, sendo que cada termo mantém relacionamentos, os quais descrevem a sua semântica, com outros. / The goal of this work is, through the study of many technologies, to develop the prototype of a tool able to offer support to the user in query formulation to the MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System On Line). The MEDLINE is a bibliographical information retrieval system in the biomedicine area developed by National Library of Medicine. It is a tool whose usefulness has been amplifyed in this area by the increase of literature utilization, eletronically available, by health care profissionals. People, in general, look for information and are interested in finding it exactly like their expectations, in an agile way and using every single information source available. With this purpouse the first Information Retrieval System (IRS ) emerged, where in a simplifyed way, a user defines a query, that expresses an information necessity and, one step ahead, the system processes it and returns to the user answers from the query. Most of the users think is difficult to represent their information necessity in order to be succesful in searching an IRS. The terms that the user selects to compose the query are not always the same that the system recognizes. In order to be successfull in the definition of the terms that will compose his/her query is advisable that the user know the terminology that was employed in the indexing process of the wanted items or that he/she can have an intermediary person who knows about it. In many situations where no one of these possibilities can be true, resources that make a successfull query possible will be needed. This work, firstly, presents a general study on IRS focusing all the process involved and related to the storage, organization and retrieval. Lately, aspects related to the medical classifications and vocabulary are emphasized, which will be usefull for a largest comprehension of the difficulties found by users during interaction with a system like this. And, finally, the prototype of the Query Formulation System to MEDLINE is presented, as well as its components and funcionalities. The Query Formulation System to MEDLINE was developed with the intention of allowing the user to use any term in the formulation of a query to the MEDLINE. It allows the integration of different medical terminologies originated from classifications and vocabulary available in Portuguese language and in use today. This approach permits the creation of a more complete biomedical terminology in which each term maintains relationships that describe its semantic.

O objetivo deste trabalho é, através do estudo de diversas tecnologias, desenvolver o protótipo de uma ferramenta capaz de oferecer suporte ao usuário na formulacdo de uma consulta a MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System On Line). A MEDLINE é um sistema de recuperação de informações bibliográficas, na área da biomedicina, desenvolvida pela National Library of Medicine. Ela é uma ferramenta cuja utilizando tem sido ampliada nesta área em decorrência do aumento da utilizando de literatura, disponível eletronicamente, por profissionais da área da saúde. As pessoas, em geral, buscam informação e esperam encontrá-la exatamente de acordo com as suas expectativas, de forma ágil e utilizando todas as fontes de recursos disponíveis. Foi com este propósito que surgiram os primeiros Sistema de Recuperação de Informação (SRI) onde, de forma simplificada, um usuário constrói uma consulta, a qual expressa sua necessidade de informação, em seguida o sistema a processa e os resultados obtidas através dela retornam ao usuário. Grande parte dos usuários encontram dificuldades em representar a sua necessidade de informação de forma a obter resultados satisfatórios em um SRI. Os termos que o usuário escolhe para compor a consulta nem sempre são os mesmos que o sistema reconhece. A fim de que um usuário seja bem sucedido na definição dos termos que compõem a sua consulta é aconselhável que ele conheça a terminologia que foi empregada na indexação dos itens que ele deseja recuperar ou que possa contar com um intermediário que possua esse conhecimento. Em situações em que nenhuma dessas possibilidades seja verdadeira recursos que viabilizem uma consulta bem sucedida se fazem necessários. Este trabalho, inicialmente, apresenta um estudo geral sobre os Sistemas de Recuperação de Informações (SRI), enfocando todos os processos envolvidos e relacionados ao armazenamento, organização e a própria recuperação. Posteriormente, são destacados aspectos relacionados aos vocabulários e classificações medicas em uso, os quais serão Úteis para uma maior compreensão das dificuldades encontradas pelos usuários durante a interação com um sistema com esta finalidade. E, finalmente, é apresentado o protótipo do Sistema para Formulação de Consultas a MEDLINE, bem como seus componentes e funcionalidades. O Sistema para Formulação de Consultas a MEDLINE foi desenvolvido com o intuito de permitir que o usuário utilize qualquer termo na formulação de uma consulta destinada a MEDLINE. Ele possibilita a integração de diferentes terminologias médicas, originárias de vocabulários e classificações disponíveis em língua portuguesa e atualmente em uso. Esta abordagem permite a criação de uma terminologia biomédica mais completa, sendo que cada termo mantém relacionamentos, os quais descrevem a sua semântica, com outros. / The goal of this work is, through the study of many technologies, to develop the prototype of a tool able to offer support to the user in query formulation to the MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System On Line). The MEDLINE is a bibliographical information retrieval system in the biomedicine area developed by National Library of Medicine. It is a tool whose usefulness has been amplifyed in this area by the increase of literature utilization, eletronically available, by health care profissionals. People, in general, look for information and are interested in finding it exactly like their expectations, in an agile way and using every single information source available. With this purpouse the first Information Retrieval System (IRS ) emerged, where in a simplifyed way, a user defines a query, that expresses an information necessity and, one step ahead, the system processes it and returns to the user answers from the query. Most of the users think is difficult to represent their information necessity in order to be succesful in searching an IRS. The terms that the user selects to compose the query are not always the same that the system recognizes. In order to be successfull in the definition of the terms that will compose his/her query is advisable that the user know the terminology that was employed in the indexing process of the wanted items or that he/she can have an intermediary person who knows about it. In many situations where no one of these possibilities can be true, resources that make a successfull query possible will be needed. This work, firstly, presents a general study on IRS focusing all the process involved and related to the storage, organization and retrieval. Lately, aspects related to the medical classifications and vocabulary are emphasized, which will be usefull for a largest comprehension of the difficulties found by users during interaction with a system like this. And, finally, the prototype of the Query Formulation System to MEDLINE is presented, as well as its components and funcionalities. The Query Formulation System to MEDLINE was developed with the intention of allowing the user to use any term in the formulation of a query to the MEDLINE. It allows the integration of different medical terminologies originated from classifications and vocabulary available in Portuguese language and in use today. This approach permits the creation of a more complete biomedical terminology in which each term maintains relationships that describe its semantic.

Devant des collections massives et hétérogènes de données, les systèmes de RI doivent désormais pouvoir appréhender des comportements d'utilisateurs aussi variés qu'imprévisibles. L'objectif de notre travail est d'évaluer la façon dont un même utilisateur verbalise un besoin informationnel à travers un énoncé de type « expression libre » (appelé langage naturel) et un énoncé de type mots-clés (appelé langage de requêtes). Pour cela, nous nous situons dans un contexte applicatif, à savoir des demandes de remboursement des utilisateurs d'un moteur de recherche dédié à des études économiques en français. Nous avons recueilli via ce moteur, les deux types d'énoncés sur 5 années consécutives totalisant un corpus de 1398 demandes en langage naturel et de 3427 requêtes. Nous avons alors comparé l'expression en tant que tel du besoin informationnel et mis en avant ce qu'apportait, en termes d'informations et de précisions, le recours à l'un ou l'autre du langage utilisé. / With the massive and heterogeneous web document collections, IR system must analyze the behaviors of users which are unpredictable and varied. The approach described in this thesis provides a comparison of the verbalizations for both natural language and web query for the same information need by the same user. For this, we used data collected (i.e. users' complaints in natural language and web queries) through a search engine dedicated to economic reports in French over 5 consecutive years totaling a corpus of 1398 natural language requests and 3427 web queries. Then, we compared the expression of the information need and highlighted the contributions in terms of information and clarification, the use of either language used.

Music researchers are seldom at the center of attention as a user group within LIS. Thus, investigations of search possibilities for digitized music manuscript collections with a user perspective are lacking. Here, three digitized music manuscript collections (the Schrank II collection in Dresden, the Utile Dulci collection in Stockholm, and the Düben collection in Uppsala) are examined with regard to the accessibility of their contents to the target user group in two steps: First, music researchers are asked about their information seeking process and queries. They are observed in surveys, interviews, and think-aloud protocols. Second, the three retrieval systems are subjected to a performance evaluation by means of precision, recall, and F1 measures. The results show that music researchers are seeking information either with known-item searching, browsing, or subject search, yet the latter with considerably different subjects than, for example, in the domain of literature. In addition, while music researchers are expressing their satisfaction with the discovery systems, the observations from protocol analysis and the performance evaluation show that all three have issues in retrieving relevant documents for music-specific queries.

While there are powerful keyword search systems that index all kinds of resources including emails and web pages, people have trouble recalling semantic facts such as the name, location, edit dates and keywords that uniquely identifies resources in their personal repositories. Reusing information exasperates this problem. A rarely used approach is to leverage episodic memory of file provenance. Provenance is traditionally defined as "the history of ownership of a valued object". In terms of documents, we consider not only the ownership, but also the operations performed on the document, especially those that related it to other people, events, or resources. This thesis investigates the potential advantages of using provenance data in desktop search, and consists of two manuscripts. First, a numerical analysis using field data from a longitudinal study shows that provenance information can effectively be used to identify files and resources in realistic repositories. We introduce the Leyline, the first provenance-based search system that supports dynamic relations between files and resources such as copy/paste, save as, file rename. The Leyline allows users to search by drawing search queries as graphs in a sketchpad. The Leyline overlays provenance information that may help users identify targets or explore information flow. A limited controlled experiment showed that this approach is feasible in terms of time and effort. Second, we explore the design of the Leyline, compare it to previous provenance-based desktop search systems, including their underlying assumptions and focus, search coverage and flexibility, and features and limitations. / Graduation date: 2012