Abstract
Real-world information needs are generally complex, yet almost all research focuses on either relatively simple search based on queries or recommendation based on profiles. It is difficult to gain insight into complex information needs from observational studies with existing systems; potentially complex needs are obscured by the systems’ limitations. In this paper we study explicit information requests in social media, focusing on the rich area of social book search. We analyse a large set of annotated book requests from the LibraryThing discussion forums. We investigate 1) the comprehensiveness of book requests on the forums, 2) what relevance aspects are expressed in real-world book search requests, and 3) how different types of search topics are related to types of users, human recommendations, and results returned by retrieval and recommender systems. We find that book search requests combine search and recommendation aspects in intricate ways that require more than only traditional search or (hybrid) recommendation approaches.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Anand, S.S., Mobasher, B.: Contextual recommendation. In: Berendt, B., Hotho, A., Mladenic, D., Semeraro, G. (eds.) WebMine 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4737, pp. 142–160. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Beckers, T., Fuhr, N., Pharo, N., Nordlie, R., Fachry, K.N.: Overview and results of the INEX 2009 interactive track. In: Lalmas, M., Jose, J., Rauber, A., Sebastiani, F., Frommholz, I. (eds.) ECDL 2010. LNCS, vol. 6273, pp. 409–412. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Bhatia, S., Mitra, P.: Adopting Inference Networks for Online Thread Retrieval. In: Proceedings of AAAI 2010. AAAI Press (2010)
Borlund, P.: The Concept of Relevance in IR. JASIST 54(10), 913–925 (2003)
Buchanan, G., McKay, D.: The bookshop: examining popular search strategies. In: Proceedings of JCDL 2011, pp. 269–278. ACM (2011)
Chandler, O.: How Consumers Discover Books Online. Tools of Change for Publishing, O’Reilly (2012)
Cosijn, E., Ingwersen, P.: Dimensions of Relevance. Information Processing & Management 36, 533–550 (2000)
Cunningham, S.J., Vanderschantz, N., Timpany, C., Hinze, A., Buchanan, G.: Social information behaviour in bookshops: Implications for digital libraries. In: Aalberg, T., Papatheodorou, C., Dobreva, M., Tsakonas, G., Farrugia, C.J. (eds.) TPDL 2013. LNCS, vol. 8092, pp. 84–95. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Dean-Hall, A., Clarke, C.L.A., Kamps, J., Thomas, P., Simon, N., Voorhees, E.: Overview of the TREC 2013 contextual suggestion track. In: Proceedings of TREC 2013. NIST (2013)
Elsas, J.L., Carbonell, J.G.: It Pays to be Picky: An Evaluation of Thread Retrieval in Online Forums. In: Proceedings of SIGIR 2009, pp. 714–715. ACM (2009)
Indri. Language modeling meets inference networks (2014), http://sourceforge.net/projects/lemur/
Koolen, M., Kazai, G., Kamps, J., Preminger, M., Doucet, A., Landoni, M.: Overview of the INEX 2012 Social Book Search Track. In: Proceedings of INEX 2012. LNCS, Springer,
Koolen, M., Kamps, J., Kazai, G.: Social Book Search: Comparing Topical Relevance Judgements and Book Suggestions for Evaluation. In: Proceedings of CIKM 2012, pp. 185–194. ACM (2012a)
Koolen, M., Kazai, G., Kamps, J., Doucet, A., Landoni, M.: Overview of the INEX 2011 books and social search track. In: Geva, S., Kamps, J., Schenkel, R. (eds.) INEX 2011. LNCS, vol. 7424, pp. 1–29. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Koolen, M., Kazai, G., Preminger, M., Doucet, A.: Overview of the INEX 2013 social book search track. In: Proceedings of the CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop (2013)
Linden, G.: Geeking with Greg: Early Amazon: Similarities (2006), http://glinden.blogspot.nl/2006/03/early-amazon-similarities.html
: Software Framework for Topic Modelling with Large Corpora. In: Proceedings of the LREC 2010 Workshop on New Challenges for NLP Frameworks, pp. 45–50. ELRA (2010)
Reuter, K.: Assessing aesthetic relevance: Children’s book selection in a digital library. JASIST 58(12), 1745–1763 (2007)
Ross, C.S.: Finding without seeking: the information encounter in the context of reading for pleasure. Information Processing & Management 35(6), 783–799 (1999)
Saracevic, T.: Relevance Reconsidered. In: Proceedings of COLIS 2, pp. 201–218 (1996)
Saracevic, T., Kantor, P.B.: A Study of Information Seeking and Retrieving. I, II, III. JASIS 39(3), 161–216 (1988)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Koolen, M., Bogers, T., van den Bosch, A., Kamps, J. (2015). Looking for Books in Social Media: An Analysis of Complex Search Requests. In: Hanbury, A., Kazai, G., Rauber, A., Fuhr, N. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9022. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16354-3_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16354-3_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16353-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16354-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)