IR seminar, March 7, 2008

Topic: Book Retrieval, Michael and Elif leading.

Background:

The goal of this week's session will be to understand and discuss book retrieval and its issues by contrasting it against other forms of retrieval (such as document retrieval). Please email us a question (or add it to the wiki) about book retrieval issues you are interested in by Friday 6am at the latest. Example questions: `What kind of queries are used in book retrieval?' or `How is evaluation done in book retrieval?'.

Required papers:

• BookSearch'07: INEX 2007 Book Search Track Overview (pp. 177-184 in the proceedings). Overview of the book retrieval task, definition of topics (queries) and evaluation measures.

• Towards Multi-Granularity Multi-Facet E-Book Retrieval. The most relevant and recent publication on book retrieval that we could find. It is only a poster, however it lays out some conceptual framework for linking together faceted retrieval and book retrieval.

• A Hybrid Information Retrieval Model Using Metadata and Text. This paper presents a inference network model for exploiting metadata in information retrieval. We will examine how this model can be applied towards book retrieval.

Recommended:

• Some Research Results in Dynamic Taxonomy and Faceted Search Systems. This paper appeared at Faceted Search Workshop at SIGIR'06. This paper is a good introduction to faceted search, which we are going to address in the context of book retrieval (Read at least the first three section of the paper.)

• A Machine Learning Model for Information Retrieval with Structured Documents This paper introduces a Bayesian Network model for book retrieval (very similar to the inference network retrieval model by Turtle & Croft). The model is interesting, however the experimental execution is quite poor.

Tangential but interesting:

• Beyond Basic Faceted Search Read it if you would like to know more about the technical issues involved in an implementation of a faceted search engine.
• SuperBook Not really an IR paper, but it is interesting to see how some of the issues raised by this 20-year old paper are still painfully relevant today.

Related Resources

You can try out both Google Books Search and Live Books Search (if you haven't done so already) to get a feel of what are the challenges associated with book retrieval.

Questions