Comparing Topic Representations for Social Book Search

In this paper we describe our participation in the INEX 2013 Social Book Search Track. We compare the impact of different query representations for book search topics derived from the LibraryThing discussion forums, including the title and full narrative provided by the topic creator, the name of the discussion group in which the topic was posted, and a mediated search query provided by a trained annotator. Our findings are that 1) the mediated queries are short and do not improve performance over the titles, but combining titles and mediated queries does, 2) the discussion group name adds relevant new terms to the representation and further improves performance, but adding the narrative is not effective, and 3) for the majority of topics retrieval effectiveness is the same across all topic representations. Our findings suggest that writing a good search query for the complex information needs in social book search is far from trivial, even for trained annotators.