Contextual search and exploration

Personalized (mobile) devices are radically changing information access tools, with rich context allowing for far more powerful, personalized search. Rather than retrieving a “document” on the topic of a “query,” the rich contextual information allows for tailored search and recommendation, and solve user’s complex tasks by taking into account complex constraints, exploring options, and combining individual answers into a coherent whole. This paper reports on a RuSSIR 2015 course covering the challenges of contextual search and recommendation, with a concrete focus on the venue recommendation task as run as part of TREC 2012–2015. It consisted of both lectures and hands-on “hackathon” sessions with data derived from the TREC task.