Using contextual information to improve retrieval performance

In this paper, we propose a contextual retrieval framework which incorporates the user and global contextual information into the probabilistic retrieval model. We investigate different techniques of using contextual information to improve information retrieval performance in details. In particular, (1) we use the related text contextual information for query expansion; (2) we use the granularity information to construct the document level index and paragraph level index; (3) we use the geographic information for filtering. In addition, a new term weighting function BM5O is proposed based on the global context information. This framework is adaptable and extensible. If there is a new context category, we can extend the existing search system to accommodate it. Finally, we report our experimental findings on TREC data sets.