Rivendell: Project-Based Academic Search Engine

TL;DR

Rivendell is a project-based meta-search engine designed to improve research literature retrieval by incorporating explicit project context, addressing concept drift, and outperforming traditional search methods in user experiments.

Contribution

This paper introduces Rivendell, a novel project-based search engine that combines domain-specific context with meta-search techniques to enhance research paper retrieval.

Findings

Up to 12.8% improvement in search performance over life-time search engines.

Effective handling of concept drift through project-based context.

Validated with 199 user experiments.

Abstract

Finding relevant research literature in online databases is a familiar challenge to all researchers. General search approaches trying to tackle this challenge fall into two groups: one-time search and life-time search. We observe that both approaches ignore unique attributes of the research domain and are affected by concept drift. We posit that in searching for research papers, a combination of a life-time search engine with an explicitly-provided context (project) provides a solution to the concept drift problem. We developed and deployed a project-based meta-search engine for research papers called Rivendell. Using Rivendell, we conducted experiments with 199 subjects, comparing project-based search performance to one-time and life-time search engines, revealing an improvement of up to 12.8 percent in project-based search compared to life-time search.