Intent Modeling : Information

COMBINING INTENT MODELING and visual user interfaces can help users discover novel information and dramatically improve their information-exploration performance. Current-generation search engines serve billions of requests each day, returning responses to search queries in fractions of a second. They are great tools for checking facts and looking up information for which users can easily create queries (such as “Find the closest restaurants” or “Find reviews of a book”). What search engines are not good at is supporting complex informationexploration and discovery tasks that go beyond simple keyword queries. In information exploration and discovery, often called “exploratory search,” users may have difficulty expressing their information needs, and new search intents may emerge and be discovered only as they learn by reflecting on the acquired information. This finding roots back to the “vocabulary mismatch problem” that was identified in the 1980s but has remained difficult to tackle in operational information retrieval (IR) systems (see the sidebar “Background”). In essence, the problem refers to human communication behavior in which the humans writing the documents to be retrieved and the humans searching for them are likely to use very different vocabularies to encode and decode their intended meaning. Assisting users in the search process is increasingly important, as everyday search behavior ranges from simple look-ups to a spectrum of search tasks in which search behavior is more exploratory and information needs and search intents uncertain and evolving over time. We introduce interactive intent modeling, an approach promoting resourceful interaction between huInteractive Intent Modeling: Information Discovery Beyond Search