A quantum solution to accessing and retrieving information
An explosion of information on anything and everything, both online and offline, is posing challenges for citizens and researchers who want to home in on particular data that they are looking for. While research in Information Access and Retrieval (IAR) has come a long way in the last three decades, experts have not yet integrated elements of 'context' to yield more advanced search engines. The EU-funded project 'Quantum contextual information access and retrieval' (QONTEXT) worked on creating better search engine technology by seamlessly integrating different dimensions of context into search engine models and evaluation protocols. What the project team meant by context is the need to take into consideration within the search specific information about the user, as well as language, system, interface and interaction. It also wanted to integrate socio-psychological dimensions and other nuances about the search in order to yield better search and research results. To achieve its aims, QONTEXT unveiled a new vision of the IAR paradigm based on quantum theory, which boasts many advantages in improving searches. Quantum theory is able to measure relevance and context more effectively. It is better at estimating the probability of relevance and to logically reason through documents and links. The concept is also ideal for understanding correlations and dependencies, as well as representing complex documents when classical correlations cannot deliver. Integrating elements of context by exploiting quantum theory may help researchers and information seekers access and retrieve more useful and meaningful information than ever before.
Keywords
Knowledge economy, quantum theory, information access and retrieval, context, search engine
