An Honourable Mention at ACM SIGIR CHIIR 2019

Tessel Bogaard, Laura Hollink, Jan Wielemaker, Lynda Hardman and Jacco van Ossenbruggen from Information Access at CWI received an Honourable Mention at the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval 2019.

The honourable mention was for their paper “Searching for Old News: User Interests and Behavior within a National Collection“, which investigates how modeling user interests helps to improve system support or refine recommendations in Interactive Information Retrieval.

The aim of this study was to identify user interests in different parts of an online collection and investigate the related search behavior. To do this, they used the metadata of selected facets and clicked documents as features for clustering sessions identified in user logs. The session clusters were evaluated by measuring their stability over a six-month period.

This approach was applied to data from the National Library of the Netherlands, a typical digital library with a richly annotated historical newspaper collection and a faceted search interface. The results show that users interested in specific parts of the collection use different search techniques. They demonstrated that a metadata-based clustering helps to reveal and understand user interests in terms of the collection, and how search behavior is related to specific parts within the collection.

Read the paper HERE

Find out more about the conference HERE

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