Enhancing information retrieval performance by using social analysis

In recent decades, researchers have realized that social networks are important sources for adhering to the evolution of many aspects of Information Retrieval (IR). These social networks have produced vast amounts of important information that are not covered by traditional IR systems. This improvement, which has become one of the main applications of IR, offers several social features such as the conversational exchange and the share of opinions by users, and the association of users with the same interests. This work introduces a model of Social Information Research that takes into account social information on users and exploits them as a second source of information for a given query. In the proposed IR system, the quality of results improved by the analysis of user’s needs and by comparing other users’ social data.