Learning dynamic information needs: A collaborative topic variation inspection approach

For projects in knowledge-intensive domains, it is crucially important that knowledge management systems are able to track and infer workers' up-to-date information needs so that task-relevant information can be delivered in a timely manner. To put a worker's dynamic information needs into perspective, we propose a topic variation inspection model to facilitate the application of an implicit relevance feedback (IRF) algorithm and collaborative filtering in user modeling. The model analyzes variations in a worker's task-needs for a topic (i.e., personal topic needs) over time, monitors changes in the topics of collaborative actors, and then adjusts the worker's profile accordingly. We conducted a number of experiments to evaluate the efficacy of the model in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure. The results suggest that the proposed collaborative topic variation inspection approach can substantially improve the performance of a basic profiling method adapted from the classical RF algorithm. It can also improve the accuracy of other methods when a worker's information needs are vague or evolving, i.e., when there is a high degree of variation in the worker's topic-needs. Our findings have implications for the design of an effective collaborative information filtering and retrieval model, which is crucial for reusing an organization's knowledge assets effectively.