Collaborative Information Retrieval: Concepts, Models and Evaluation

Recent work have shown the potential of collaboration for solving complex or exploratory search tasks allowing to achieve synergic effects with respect to individual search, which is the prevalent information retrieval (IR) setting this last decade. This interactive multi-user context gives rise to several challenges in IR. One main challenge relies on the adaptation of IR techniques or models [8] in order to build algorithmic supports of collaboration distributing documents among users. The second challenge is related to the design of Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR) models and their effectiveness evaluation since individual IR frameworks and measures do not totally fit with the collaboration paradigms. In this tutorial, we address the second challenge and present first a general overview of collaborative search introducing the main underlying notions. Then, we focus on related work dealing with collaborative ranking models and their effectiveness evaluation. Our primary objective is to introduce these notions by highlighting how and why they should be different from individual IR in order to give participants the main clues for investigating new research directions in this domain with a deep understanding of current CIR work.