Abstract:

The World Wide Web (WWW) has grown into a rich repository of information. The vast amount of data on the web however would require the users to be skilled in querying generic information retrieval (GIR) systems to meet their information need. This is further complicated by various noises on the web such as spam and advertisement. Thus, we explore the potential of personal information retrieval (PIR) systems in meeting the users’ information need effectively and efficiently. We focus on the user profiling (UP) aspect of PIR systems as it would directly determine the system’s ability to address the users’ information need. With the high adoption of web 2.0 systems among the users of the web, web 2.0 systems proved to be an important source of user information for improvement in user profiling. We term such systems as web2PIR and explore their potential in improving user profilers and their impact for information systems.