Personalised information retrieval in specialised virtual libraries

The New Information Technology in Engineering Science Field project focuses on the virtual library's contribution to the education and research field. Different teams are involved in this project. The team specialized in information retrieval aims to design an intelligent tutoring system capable of performing personalized information retrieval, depending on users' interests. The proposed system is specially designed for people who have a sight deficiency. These specific persons use slow devices to access scientific textual information, so they have a critical need for systems able to retrieve relevant information quickly. For these reasons, intelligent systems to define and manage particular user interests are needed. Researchers aim to improve answer quality by personalizing the retrieval and by performing user profile management. Some results from an information filtering and extraction system are presented.