Retrieval of Single Wikipedia Articles While Reading Abstracts

When reading online, users sometimes need auxiliary information to complement or fill in their own background knowledge in order to better understand a document that they are reading. We believe that delivering this information in the least intrusive fashion possible will improve their understanding. We have prototyped a system that selects a single Wikipedia article for users when they highlight text in an abstract. This prototype employs a contextual retrieval algorithm developed for high precision retrieval of Wikipedia articles that uses the terms in the abstract, currently being read, as a context for the search. The results from our evaluation reveal that the top-performing algorithm is able to respond with a single relevant article 77% of the time. The user study that we conducted indicates that participants have a strong preference for this approach to searching while reading.