Profiles and Context for Structured Text Retrieval

The combination of structured information retrieval with user profile information represents the scenario where systems search with an explicit statement of the information need—a search query—as well as a profile of a user, which can contain information about previous interactions, search history, user demographics, or other relevant information about the user’s preferences. The relation between the profile and the information need is implicit and may contain many irrelevant signals. The task of the system then is to model both the current information need and the background user preferences to derive notions of topical relevance as well as user relevance and to find the right balance between these notions to determine the optimal ranking of search results.