Unlike traditional digital libraries, the Web content providers have to cope with people who often do not know well what they are looking for. Imprecise queries head to output overload. Interactive information retrieval (IIR) is a way to help a user zero in on the information intended. An interactive process is a sequence of actions a user takes to communicate with the IR system. The user first issues a query, receives the results, and then interacts with the system to tune the queries and results toward what he wants. IIR may come in many forms - via a thesaurus, through relevance feedback, query result clustering, or other information processing techniques. We propose here a model, called focalization, which gives a mathematical treatment of IIR.
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