Extending Term Suggestion with Author Names

TL;DR

This paper explores enhancing term suggestion modules in digital libraries by incorporating author names, demonstrating that combining author names with thesaurus terms improves retrieval performance.

Contribution

It introduces a method to include author names in query expansion, showing significant performance gains in IR evaluations when combined with thesaurus terms.

Findings

Adding author names with thesaurus terms improves retrieval performance.

Including only author names can cause query drift and reduce effectiveness.

Author names are explicitly sought by users in social science digital libraries.

Abstract

Term suggestion or recommendation modules can help users to formulate their queries by mapping their personal vocabularies onto the specialized vocabulary of a digital library. While we examined actual user queries of the social sciences digital library Sowiport we could see that nearly one third of the users were explicitly looking for author names rather than terms. Common term recommenders neglect this fact. By picking up the idea of polyrepresentation we could show that in a standardized IR evaluation setting we can significantly increase the retrieval performances by adding topical-related author names to the query. This positive effect only appears when the query is additionally expanded with thesaurus terms. By just adding the author names to a query we often observe a query drift which results in worse results.