SIGIR WORKSHOP REPORT Report on the SIGIR Workshop on entertain me : Supporting Complex Search Tasks Nicholas J. Belkin1 Charles L. A. Clarke2 Ning Gao3 Jaap Kamps4 Jussi Karlgren5 Rutgers, USA 2 Waterloo, Canada 3 Peking University, China University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands 5 SICS Stockholm, Sweden Abstract Searchers with a complex information need typically slice-and-dice their problem into several queries and subqueries, and laboriously combine the answers post hoc to solve their tasks. Consider planning a social event at the last day of SIGIR, in the unknown city of Beijing, factoring in distances, timing, and preferences on budget, cuisine, and entertainment. A system supporting the entire search episode should know a lot, either from pro les or implicit information, or from explicit information in the query or from feedback. This may lead to the (interactive) construction of a complexly structured query, but sometimes the most obvious query for a complex need is dead simple: entertain me. Rather than returning ten-blue-lines in response to a 2.4-word query, the desired system should support searchers during their whole task or search episode, by iteratively constructing a complex query or search strategy, by exploring the result-space at every stage,
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/report-on-the-sigir-workshop-on-entertain-me-supporting-complex-search-uTtLcAhoGb