An exploratory study on using social information networks for flexible literature access

Lynda Tamine (1) , Lamjed Ben Jabeur (1) , Wahiba Bahsoun (1, 2)

1 IRIT-SIG - Systèmes d’Informations Généralisées
2 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier

It is well known that the fundamental intellectual problems of information access are the production and consumption of information. In this paper, we investigate the use of social network of information pro- ducers (authors) within relations in data (co-authorship and citation) in order to improve the relevance of information access. Relevance is derived from the network by levraging the usual topical similarity between the query and the document with the target author's authority. We explore various social network based measures for computing social information importance and show how this kind of contextual information can be incorporated within an information access model. We experiment with a collection issued from SIGIR1 proceedings and show that combining topical, author and citation based evidences can significantly improve retrieval access precision, measured in terms of mean reciprocal rank.

Mots clés: experimental evaluation; social networks; literature access

Domaines: Recherche d'information [cs.IR]

Lynda Tamine, Lamjed Ben Jabeur, Wahiba Bahsoun. An exploratory study on using social information networks for flexible literature access. Flexible Query Answering Systems (2009), Oct 2009, Roskild, Denmark. pp.88-98, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-04957-6⟩. ⟨hal-00476149⟩