Ask for Information Retrieval: Part I. Background and Theory

By Nicholas J. Belkin, R. N. Oddy, H. Brooks. 1997

We report the results of a British Library Research and Development Department‐funded design study for an interactive information retrieval system which will determine structural representations of the anomalous states of knowledge (ASKs) underlying information needs, and attempt to resolve the anomalies through a variety of retrieval strategies performed on a database of documents represented in compatible structural formats. Part I discusses the background to the project and the theory underlying it, Part II (next issue) presents our methods, results and conclusions. Basic premises of the project were: that information needs are not in principle precisely specifiable; that it is possible to elicit problem statements from information system users from which representations of the ASK underlying the need can be derived; that there are classes of ASKs; and, that all elements of information retrieval systems ought to be based on the user's ASK. We have developed a relatively freeform interview technique for eliciting problem statements, and a statistical word co‐occurrence analysis for deriving network representations of the problem statements and abstracts. Structural characteristics of the representations have been used to determine classes of ASKs, and both ASK and information structures have been evaluated by, respectively, users and authors. Some results are: that interviewing appears to be a satisfactory technique for eliciting problem statements from which ASKs can be determined; that the statistical analysis produces structures which are generally appropriate both for documents and problem statements; that ASKs thus represented can be usefully classified according to their structural characteristics; and, that of thirty‐five subjects, only two had ASKs for which traditional ‘best match’ retrieval would be intuitively appropriate. The results of the design study indicate that at least some of our premises are reasonable, and that an ASK‐based information retrieval system is at least feasible.

Subfields: Information Retrieval & Search

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Citations in the corpus

Boosting Search Engines with Interactive Agents (2021, neutral): “It can be diﬃcult for users to formulate eﬀective queries because of the information gap that triggers the search process in the ﬁrst place (Belkin et al., 1982).”
Beliefs and biases in web search (2013, background): “Numerous models of the search process have been developed over the past few decades [4][17][23][24][30].”
A review of Web searching studies and a framework for future research (2001, background): “In fact, it is not even certain how a searcher conducts the search process, although there are several theories on the information seeking process ( Belkin, Oddy, & Brooks 1982; Saracevic, 1996) that attempt to explain it. Most of these theories are based on empirical analyses of users and, in many”
On the history of evaluation in IR (2008, methodology): “Belkin went to City University, and teamed up with Oddy for a design study [22] of an IR system based on the ASK model.”
From Semantic Retrieval to Conversational Agent: A Web-Based RAG Architecture for Interactive System Dynamics Modeling (2026, unknown): “When querying complex repositories, novice users frequently report an “anomalous state of knowledge” (ASK) [26].”
ExpandR: Teaching Dense Retrievers Beyond Queries with LLM Guidance (2025, unknown): “In particular, queries are often underspecified, ambiguous, or semantically incomplete, which limits the retriever’s ability to accurately locate relevant content (Belkin et al., 1982; Ingwersen, 1996).”