7 October 2011, PhD defense, Rianne Kaptein

The goal of an IR system is to retrieve documents containing information which might be useful or relevant to the user. Throughout the search process there is a loss of focus, because keyword queries entered by users often do not suitably summarise their complex information needs, and IR systems do not suciently interpret the contents of documents, leading to result lists containing irrelevant and redundant information. The main research objective of this thesis is to exploit query context and document structure to provide for more focused retrieval.