Detecting Document Genre for Personalization of Information Retrieval

We report on the effectiveness of language models for personalization of retrieval results based on a searcher’s preference for document genre. In principle, such preferences can be obtained via implicit relevance feedback through the observation of the searcher’s actions and behavior during search sessions. While our approach did not produce significant improvement to retrieval effectiveness, the methodology and experimental setting can and are being used for further work on exploring genre-based personalization.