Structured text retrieval by means of affordances and genre.

Clark, Malcolm

Abstract

This paper offers a proposal for some preliminary research on the retrieval of structured text, such as extensible mark-up language (XML). We believe that capturing the way in which a reader perceives the meaning of documents, especially genres of text, may have implications for information retrieval (IR) and in particular, for cognitive IR and relevance. Previous research on shallow features of structured text has shown that categorization by form is possible. Gibsons theory of affordances and genre offer the reader the meaning and purpose - through structure - of a text, before the reader has even begun to read it, and should therefore provide a good basis for the deep skimming and categorization of texts. We believe that Gibsons affordances will aid the user to locate, examine and utilize shallow or deep features of genres and retrieve relevant output. Our proposal puts forward two hypotheses, with a list of research questions to test them, and culminates in experiments involving the studies of human categorization behaviour when viewing the structures of emails and web documents. Finally, we will examine the effectiveness of adding structural layout cues to a Yahoo discussion forum (currently only a bag-of-words), which is rich in structure, but only searchable through a Boolean search engine.

Citation

CLARK, M. 2007. Structured text retrieval by means of affordances and genre. In MacFarlane, A., Azzopardi, L. and Ounis, I. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1st British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) symposium on future directions in information access (FDIA 2007), 28-29 August 2007, Glasgow, UK. London: BCS [online]. Available from: https://ewic.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/13788

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 1st British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) symposium on future directions in information access (FDIA 2007)
• Start Date: Aug 28, 2007
• End Date: Aug 29, 2007
• Acceptance Date: Aug 31, 2007
• Online Publication Date: Aug 31, 2007
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2007
• Deposit Date: Mar 23, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 23, 2015
• Electronic ISSN: 1477-9358
• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Series Title: Electronic workshops in computing
• Keywords: Categorisation; Genre; Affordances; Skimming
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/1170
• Publisher URL: https://ewic.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/13788
• Contract Date: Mar 23, 2015