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Here's a good one, a paper on utilizing a user's context for removing ambiguity from a search query, by identifying the "larger task" that a searcher is involved with:
Owing to the inherent ambiguity and incompleteness of queries, it is difficult for search engines to maintain high relevance. Queries might be topic-wise ambiguous, as exemplified by “jaguar” or “Michael Jordan.” Queries might be intent-wise ambiguous; for example, “stem cell” might connote either biology or ethics. Interestingly, disambiguation is immediate if one pays attention to the context...In a nutshell, contextual search refers to proactively capturing the information need of a user by automatically augmenting the user query with information extracted from the search context; for example, by using terms from the web page the user is currently browsing or a file the user is currently editing...
