Personalising Information Retrieval using Evolutionary Modelling

Researchers and students need information retrieval tools that will support them in their work. To provide effective support, such tools must be able to track changing interests and automatically suggest new, possibly unrelated, information that might be helpful. An approach to representing a user interest profile using an evolutionary model, a form of genetic algorithm, is described. The profile is maintained with user feedback and genetic operators and initial testing with a database of academic journal abstracts has found this to be a promising technique.