An In-depth Analysis of Tags and Controlled Metadata for Book Search

AN IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS OF TAGS AND CONTROLLED METADATA FOR BOOK SEARCH

T OINE BOGERSVIV IEN P ET RAS

MARCH 23, 2017iCONFERENCE 2017

OUTLINE

▸ Introduction

▸ Methodology & Experimental Setup

▸ Analysis

– Tags vs. Controlled Vocabularies

– Book Search Requests

– Failure Analysis

▸ Conclusions & Future Work

2

INTRODUCTION

MOTIVATION

▸ Readers often struggle with existing systems (i.e., library catalogs, Amazon, eBook sellers) to discover new books

– Information needs are contextual, personal & complex

– Book metadata does not contain the necessary information

4

EARLIER WORK

▸ iConference 2015

– Tags outperform controlled vocabularies for search, but sometimes controlled vocabularies are better.

– Controlled vocabularies contains more unique terms, tags more repetition of terms.

▸ Why?

– Terminology

– Popularity / frequency

– Type of request

5

STUDY OBJECTIVES

▸ Why are tags better than controlled vocabularies for book search?

– Which types of book search requests are better addressed using tags and which using CV?

– Which book search requests fail completely and what characterizes such requests?

6

METHODOLOGY & EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

▸ Controlled Vocabulary content (CV)

– DDC class labels

– Subjects

– Geographic names

– Category labels

– LCSH terms

▸ Tags

– Each tag occurs as many times as it has been assigned bythe users

▸ Unique tags

– Each tag occurs only once

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AMAZON/LIBRARYTHING COLLECTION 9

TagsTags

Controlled Vocabulary Content (CV)

DDC class labelssubjectsgeographic namescategory labels

LCSH terms

Unique TagsUnique Tags per record

ANNOTATED LT TOPIC

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Recommended books

Topic title

Narrative

EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

▸ Amazon / LibraryThing collection of book records

– 2 million records

▸ LibraryThing forum topics for search requests

– 334 search requests for testing

▸ Relevance judgements

– Recommendations from LT members with graded relevance scoring(highest relevance if book is added by searcher)

▸ Evaluation metric

– Normalized Discounted Cumulated Gain (NDCG@10)

▸ IR system

– Indri 5.4 toolkit

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ANALYSIS

TAGS vs. CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES

▸ Question 1: Is there a difference in performance between CV and Tags in retrieval?

▸ Answer

– Tags perform significantlybetter than CV

– The combination of both results in even better performance than just fortags, but not significantly so

– Losing tag frequencyinformation helps rather thanhurts performance (also notsignificantly)

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TAGS vs. CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES

▸ Question 2: Do tags outperform CV because of the so-called popularity effect?

▸ Answer

– No, there does not seem to be a popularity effect

– Types = unique words in a record

– Tokens = all instances of words in a record

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TAGS vs. CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES

▸ Question 3: Do Tags and CV complement or cancel each other out?

▸ Answer

– Tags and CV complement each other: they are successful on different sets of requests

– But most zero-difference requests (74.0%) actually fail completely!When and why?

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REQUESTS – RELEVANCE ASPECTS

▸ What makes a suggested book relevant to the user?

– Distinguish between eight relevance aspects (Reuter, 2007; Koolen et al., 2015)

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REQUESTS – RELEVANCE ASPECTS

Aspect Description % of requests(N = 87)

Accessibility Language, length, or level of difficulty of a book 9.2 %

Content Topic, plot, genre, style, or comprehensiveness 79.3 %

Engagement Fit a certain mood or interest, are considered high quality, or provide a certain reading experience 25.3 %

Familiarity Similar to known books or related to a previous experience 47.1 %

Known-item The user is trying to identify a known book, but cannot remember the metadata that would locate it 12.6 %

Metadata With a certain title or by a certain author or publisher, in a particular format, or certain year 23.0 %

Novelty Unusual or quirky, or containing novel content 3.4 %

Socio-cultural Related to the user's socio-cultural background or values; popular or obscure 13.8 %

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REQUESTS – RELEVANCE ASPECTS

▸ Question 4: What types of book requests are best served by the Unique tags and CV collections?

▸ Answer

– CV terms show a tendency to work best for requests that touch upon aspects of engagement

– Other requests are best served by Unique tags

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REQUESTS – RELEVANCE ASPECTS

iConference ���� [Petras & Bogers]

Relevanceaspect

Description Requestsoverall

UniqueTags> CV

CV > Uni-queTags

(N = ��) (N = ��) (N = ��)

Accessibility Language, length, or level of di�culty of a book �.�% �.�% ��.�%Content Topic, plot, genre, style, or comprehensiveness ��.�% ��.�% ��.�%Engagement Fit a certain mood or interest, are considered high

quality, or provide a certain reading experience��.�% ��.�% ��.�%

Familiarity Similar to known books or related to a previousexperience

��.�% ��.�% ��.�%

Known-item

The user is trying to identify a known book, butcannot remember the metadata that would locate it

��.�% ��.�% �.�%

Metadata With a certain title or by a certain author or pub-lisher, in a particular format, or certain year

��.�% ��.�% ��.�%

Novelty Unusual or quirky, or containing novel content �.�% �.�% �%Socio-cultural

Related to the user’s socio-cultural background orvalues; popular or obscure

��.�% ��.�% �.�%

Table �: Distribution of the relevance aspects over all �� successful book requests (column �), the requests where Unique

tags outperform CV terms by ���% or more (column �), and the requests where CV terms outperform Unique tags by ���%or more (column �). More than one aspect can apply to a single book request, so numbers to not add up to ���%.

0,00 0,10 0,20 0,30 0,40 0,50 0,60 0,70 0,80 0,90 1,00

Socio-cultural (N = 10)

Novelty (N = 2)

Metadata (N = 17)

Known-item (N = 11)

Familiarity (N = 36)

Engagement (N = 21)

Content (N = 63)

Accessibility (N = 7)

Unique tagsCV

0.0 0.20.1 0.40.3 0.60.5 0.80.7 1.00.9

Socio-cultural(N = 10)

0.11270.0428

Novelty(N = 2)

0.53040.0000

Metadata(N = 17)

0.24540.1259

Known-item(N = 11)

0.35930.1818

Familiarity(N = 36)

0.18330.0701

Engagement(N = 21)

0.11210.1425

Content(N = 63)

0.19650.0821

Accessibility(N = 7)

0.12350.0749

Performance grouped by relevance aspect

NDCG@10

Figure �: Results for the Unique tags and CV test collections, grouped by the eight relevance aspects expressed in the ��successful book search requests. Average NDCG@�� scores over all requests expressing a particular relevance aspect areshown in grey and as horizontal bars, with error bars in black.

�

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REQUESTS – TYPE OF BOOK

▸ Question 5: What types of book requests (fiction or non-fiction) are best served by Unique tags or CV?

▸ Answer

– Unique tags work significantly better for fiction

– CV work better for non-fiction (but not significantly so)

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FAILURE ANALYSIS

▸ Question 6: Do failed book search requests fail because of data sparsity, a lower recall base, or a lack of examples?

▸ Answer

– Neither sparsity nor the size of the recall base are the reason for retrieval failure

– The number of examples provided by the requester has significant positive influence on performance

(N = 247)(N = 87)

(N = 334)

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FAILURE ANALYSIS

▸ Question 7: Do book search requests fail because of their relevance aspects?

▸ Answer

– No, relevance aspects are distributed equally for successful & failed requests

– Only Accessibility-and Metadata-related search requests seem to fail more often

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FAILURE ANALYSIS

▸ Question 8: Does the type of book that is being requested (fiction vs. non-fiction) have an influence on whether requests succeed or fail?

▸ Answer

– Requests for works of fiction fail significantly more often

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CONCLUSIONS &FUTURE WORK

FINDINGS

▸ Tags outperform CV...

– ...probably because their terminology is closer to the user‘slanguage (not because of the popularity effect)

▸ Sometimes CV are better, for example, for non-fiction books...

– ...whereas tags are better for fiction and for content-related, familiarity or known-item searches

▸ We believe that tags are simply better able to match the user‘slanguage when looking for books

– Although they are still not that great at it!

– Book search is still hard, especially for fiction books

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OPEN QUESTIONS

▸ How can book metadata be adapted to be closer to thevocabulary used in real-world book search requests?

▸ What other aspects (besides type of requested book orrelevance aspect of search request) contribute to requestdifficulty?

▸ Our question to you:

– What other questions can we ask of this data?

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QUESTIONS?

Paper URL: http://bit.ly/iconf2017