Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. E-mail:watters@cs.dal.ca
Based on a paper contributed to the Seminar on Knowledge Representation and Information Retrieva, 22nd – 24th March 2006, Documentation Research and Training Centre, Indian Statistical Institute, 8th mile, Mysore Road, Bangalore.
In this paper we examine the role of genre in improving user effectiveness in information tasks on the Web. The goal of the research is to investigate how genre can help Web users identify more quickly documents that are not only content relevant but task relevant as well. That is, among all of the documents retrieved for a given user query, can genre identification help the user identify those pages that best fit the goal of the user's task. For example, scholarly papers for users conducting research and newspapers for users catching up on world events. To accomplish this goal we need to first understand genre in the context of the Web and then identify algorithmic approaches that will automatically identify the genre of given Web pages.
