Anticipating Information Needs: Budzik, Hammond, Marlow, Scheinkman

In recent years, we have experienced an explosion in the amount of information available online. Unfortunately, tools which allow users to access this information are still quite rudimentary. Users are forced to express their information needs in boolean query languages. More, results returned are often unnecessarily redundant and poor in quality, partly because the user is unable to specify his needs in terms of a query well enough, and partly because of the stupidity of the software servicing his query. More intelligent systems allow users to pose their information needs in the form of a question [Burke, et al., 1997]. Nonetheless, these kinds of systems still require the user to make his information needs explicit to the system. Thus, while Internet search engines provide a first step at solving this information access problem, most of them not only fail to produce good results reliably, but are also hard to use. Question-answering systems provide a solution to part of this problem, yet remain inconvenient.