Query Modification Based on Real-World Contexts for Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing Environments

With the growing amount of information on the WWW and the improvement of mobile computing environments, mobile Web search engines will increase significance or more in the future. Because mobile devices have the restriction of output performance and we have little time for browsing information slowly while moving or doing some activities in the real world, it is necessary to refine the retrieval results in mobile computing environments better than in fixed ones. However, since a mobile user’s query is often shorter and more ambiguous than a fixed user’s query which is not enough to guess his/her information demand accurately, too many results might be retrieved by commonly used Web search engines. This paper proposes two novel methods for query modification based on real-world contexts of a mobile user, such as his/her geographic location and the objects surrounding him/her, aiming to enhance location-awareness, and moreover, context-awareness, to the existing location-free information retrieval systems.