Polyrepresentation of Information Needs and Semantic Entities Elements of a Cognitive Theory for Information Retrieval Interaction

The paper outlines the principles underlying the theory of polyrepresentation applied to the user’s cognitive space and the information space of IR systems, set in a cognitive framework. By means of polyrepresentation it is suggested to represent the current user’s information need, problem state, and domain work task or interest in a structure of causality as well as to embody semantic full-text entities by means of the principle of ‘intentional redundancy’. hi IR systems this principle implies simultaneously to apply different methods of representation and a variety of IR techniques of different cognitive origin to each entity. The objective is to aproximate as close as possible text retrieval to retrieval of information in a cognitive sense.