System and method for collaborative ranking of search results employing user and group profiles derived from document collection content analysis

A system for ranking search results obtained from an information retrieval system, comprising

• a search pre-processor, responsive to a search query, for determining a context of the search query in accordance with a predetermined user context profile;
• a search engine, responsive to the search query, for generating a search result comprising at least one item obtained from the information retrieval system;
• and
• a search post-processor, responsive to the search result, for ranking the item in accordance with the context of the search query;
• a context profiler for generating a context profile;
• and
• a document collection comprising a set of documents;
• wherein the context profiler comprises a community profiler for constructing a term-weight vector for the community, the term-weight vector being extracted from each document in the document collection and the community comprising a plurality of users u;
• wherein the community profile Pc=(ti, wci) comprises the set of terms {ti} with their weights wci for each of the individual users u in the community;
• wherein each member u in the community is assigned a weight αu and for the whole community:
• Σuαu=1.

A system for ranking search results obtained from an information retrieval system, comprising:

• a search pre-processor, responsive to a search query, for determining a context of the search query in accordance with a predetermined user context profile;
• wherein the predetermined user context profile comprises a community profile, Pc=(ti, wci) where wci=Σuαuwiu, is the weight of ti in a profile of user u in the community and αu is the weight of each user in the community;
• wherein the search pre-processor determines a profile of the query Pq=(tqi,wqi) in accordance with the predetermined user profile, wherein tqi comprise the query terms having term weight, wqi;
• a search engine, responsive to the search query, for generating a search result comprising at least one item obtained from the information retrieval system;
• and
• a search post-processor, responsive to the search result, for ranking the item in accordance with the context of the search query;
• wherein the search post-processor evaluates each item d in the search result and generates a document profile Pd=(tdi, wdi) for each item d, where tdi is the profile term and wdi the weight of each term.

A method of creating a user context profile for use in ranking search results obtained from an information retrieval system, comprising:

• providing a document collection comprising a plurality of relevant documents;
• assigning a rating to each of the documents in the document collection to generate a document profile Pd=(tdi, wdi) for each document in the collection;
• constructing a weight-term vector, wherein the weight-term vector includes a portion of the set of terms {tdi} with their weights wdi to form a user profile Pu=(ti, wui;
• for each document d returned in response to a search query q, generating a document profile, Pd=(tdi, wdi);
• and
• evaluating the search document rank in accordance with:
• relevance q , d = ∑ i ⁢ ⁢ w i d × w i u · w i q w d
• where wdi is the weight of term t in the response document d, wui is the weight of term t in the user context profile, wqi is the weight of the term t in the query q, and wd is the vector length “projected” on the context profile and evaluated as w d = ∑ t ⁢ ⁢ ( w i u ⁢ w i d ) 2 ;
• and
• and
• updating the user context profile using the highest ranked item returned from the search query.