A context-sensitive search mechanism

Collaborative help systems are a widely used type of information systems. Users seeking information, post questions on a collaborative help system, which are answered by other users who possess the requested information. Collaborative help systems often contain domains of information that are significantly disparate. There may exist several questions in a collaborative help system, which have similar wording but dissimilar context and therefore each one of them has completely different answers. When searching the collaborative help system for a certain question, it is quite possible that a regular-search mechanism would return some question that is not in the context that the user wanted. A search mechanism that is sensitive to context, however, would produce the correct result. In this paper we present our context-sensitive search mechanism. The mechanism uses the recent activity of a user as the context of their questions and searches. The mechanism has been implemented in our collaborative help system called knowledge exchange.