My research interests are in the area of Information Retrieval (IR). The goal of my research is to understand how people interact with search systems and to build retrieval techniques and systems that support people to find useful information effectively.
My current work involves understanding how people interact with search systems when searching to generate ideas and building search tools that enhances their creative performance.
My Ph.D. work investigated the use of language similarities to improve retrieval quality and user experience for speakers of resource-scarce languages. This work involved several facets of retrieval: firstly, understanding behaviour and preferences of users interacting with search results written in closely related languages, varieties, and dialects; secondly, building ranking models that integrate intelligibility and topical relevance features; thirdly, designing user interface for presentation of such search results; and lastly, building multilingual stemming tools based on shared morphological features of related languages.