Exploiting informal communities in information retrieval

Widespread access to the Internet has led to the formation of scientific communities collaborating through the network. Most retrieval systems are geared towards Boolean queries or hierarchical classification based on keyword descriptors. Information retrieval problem is too big to be solved with a single model or with a single tool. In this paper we present a framework for information retrieval exploiting topic lattice generated from a collection of documents where documents are characterized by a group of users with overlapping interests. The topic lattice captures the authors' intention as it reveals the implicit structure of a document collection following the structure of groups of individuals expressing interests in the documents. it suggests navigation methods that may be an interesting alternative to the traditional search styles exploiting keyword descriptors.