Overview of the INEX 2014 Interactive Social Book Search Track

Abstract. Users looking for books online are confronted with both pro-fessional meta-data and user-generated content. The goal of the Interac-tive Social Book Search Track was to investigate how users used these two sources of information, when looking for books in a leisure context. To this end participants recruited by four teams performed two different tasks using one of two book-search interfaces. Additionally one of the two interfaces also investigated whether user performance can be improved by providing a user-interface that supports multiple search stages.

Effective metadata for social book search from a user perspective

Abstract. In this extended abstract we describe our participation in the INEX 2014 Interactive Social Book Search Track. In previous work, we have looked at the impact of professional and user-generated metadata in the context of book search, and compared these different categories of metadata in terms of retrieval effectiveness. Here, we take a different approach and study the use of professional and user-generated metadata of books in an interactive setting, and the effectivity of this metadata from a user perspective. We compare the perceived usefulness of general descriptions, publication metadata, user reviews and tags in focused and open-ended search tasks, based on data gathered in the INEX Interactive Social Book Search Track. Furthermore, we take a tentative look at the actual use of different types of metadata over time in the aggregated search tasks. Our preliminary findings in the surveyed tasks indicate that user reviews are generally perceived to be more useful than other types of metadata, and they are frequently mentioned in users ’ rationales for selecting books. Furthermore, we observe a varying usage frequency of traditional and user-generated metadata across time in the aggregated search tasks, pro-viding initial indications that these types of metadata might be useful at different stages of a search task.

Lessons learned from the CHiC and SBS interactive tracks: a wishlist for interactive IR evaluation

Over the course of the past two decades, the Interactive Tracks at TREC and INEX have contributed greatly to our knowledge of how to run an interactive IR evaluation campaign. In this position paper, we add to this body of knowledge by taking stock of our own experiences and challenges in organizing the CHIC and SBS Interactive Tracks from 2013 to 2016 in the form of a list of important properties of any future IIR evaluation campaigns