DISSERTATION ABSTRACT A Probabilistic Framework for Information Modelling and Retrieval Based on User Annotations on Digital Objects Ingo Frommholz University of Duisburg-Essenâ ingo@is.inf.uni-due.de http://www.is.inf.uni-due.de/sta Â/ingo.html.en Annotations are a means to make critical remarks, to explain and comment things, to add notes and give opinions, and to relate objects. Nowadays, they can be found in digital libraries and collaboratories, for example as a building block for scienti Âc discussion on the one hand or as private notes on the other hand. We further Ând them in product reviews, scienti Âc databases and many ÂWeb 2.0  applications; even well-established concepts like emails can be regarded as annotations in a certain sense. Digital annotations can be (textual) comments, markings (i.e. highlighted parts) and references to other documents or document parts. Since annotations convey information which is potentially important to satisfy a user Âs information need, this thesis tries to answer the question of how to exploit annotations for information retrieval. It introduces POLAR, a probabilistic, logic-based framework for annotation-based retrieval, and gives a Ârst answer to the question if retrieval e Âectiveness can be improved with annotations. A survey of the Âannotation universe  reveals some facets of annotations; for
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