This grant is an ARC Linkage Grant which facilitates our collaboration with Panviva P/L, a Melbourne based company that provides customer support software. In particular we will be working with Panviva to explore the search engine within their software, and to research new ways to exploit user context to improve results for users of the SupportPoint system.
Standard search engines use a query to identify matching documents from within large collections. In enterprise search, however, there is substantial contextual evidence that can be used to improve the quality of answers returned, such as the user's history, the position of a document in a hierarchy, and the success of related searches. Also, search data may provide information about document quality. In this project, we plan to develop new techniques for improving authoring and search in the context of enterprises where documents are used to describe work processes. These techniques have the potential to provide users with significantly better access to their workplace information.