Short description of her research activity
The research activity of Gabriella Pasi is finalized at defining innovative models and systems that allow effective access to digital information relevant to specific user needs. The considered systems include Information Retrieval and Filtering Systems, Database Management Systems, and Decision Support Systems.
The common objective of the research activities undertaken in this context is defining flexible systems, able to manage both precise and imperfect information, i.e. information affected by imprecision/vagueness and/or uncertainty. The design of such flexible systems has been pursued by investigating the application of “soft computing” techniques (mainly based on fuzzy set theory, possibility theory, and fuzzy multi-criteria decision making) to various tasks concerning both information representation and retrieval.
In particular, the use of Possibility Theory has been investigated to define models for the representation of incomplete data and information; Fuzzy Set Theory has been applied to define both flexible query languages, and innovative retrieval models. Some aspects of Multi-Criteria Decision Theory, especially concerning the problem of aggregation, have been studied in the context of relevance assessment (seen as a problem of multiple constraint evaluation).
She is actually working on various research topics, with the main aim of defining systems able to both learn user’s preferences and to adapt to the user’s context. Among the topics of current research:
- Definition of systems for contextual information access
- Definition of systems for scientific paper recommendation
- User Profiling by means of language and topic models
- Definition of filtering models based on the assessment of multiple criteria
- Social and collaborative search
- Information diffusion on social networks