ISART: A Generic Framework for Searching Books with Social Information

Effective book search has been discussed for decades and is still future-proof in areas as diverse as computer science, informatics, e-commerce and even culture and arts. A variety of social information contents (e.g, ratings, tags and reviews) emerge with the huge number of books on the Web, but how they are utilized for searching and finding books is seldom investigated. Here we develop an Integrated Search And Recommendation Technology (IsArt), which breaks new ground by providing a generic framework for searching books with rich social information. IsArt comprises a search engine to rank books with book contents and professional metadata, a Generalized Content-based Filtering model to thereafter rerank books with user-generated social contents, and a learning-to-rank technique to finally combine a wide range of diverse reranking results. Experiments show that this technology permits embedding social information to promote book search effectiveness, and IsArt, by making use of it, has the best performance on CLEF/INEX Social Book Search Evaluation datasets of all 4 years (from 2011 to 2014), compared with some other state-of-the-art methods.