Validating the importance of work tasks as context for professional search

Abstract

In professional search many work tasks share some structure and are likely to recur. We argue that retrieval in the context of such tasks can exploit prior knowledge about these tasks to serve more relevant results. Understanding why someone searches can help to distill and express the user's information desires. In order to validate the value of this approach, we asked users to judge search results with and without a new search filter that narrowed down the results to documents relevant to the work tasks.Initial results suggest the importance of exploiting work tasks as context for professional search, although future work should consider the extent of this effect.