In recent years, the importance of research data and the need to archive and to share it in the scientific community have increased enormously. This introduces a whole new set of challenges for digital libraries. In the social sciences typical research data sets consist of surveys and questionnaires. In this paper we focus on the use case of social science survey question reuse and on mechanisms to support users in the query formulation for data sets. We describe and evaluate thesaurus- and co-occurrence-based approaches for query expansion to improve retrieval quality in digital libraries and research data archives. The challenge here is to translate the information need and the underlying sociological phenomena into proper queries. As we can show retrieval quality can be improved by adding related terms to the queries. In a direct comparison automatically expanded queries using extracted co-occurring terms can provide better results than queries manually reformulated by a domain expert and better results than a keyword-based BM25 baseline.
A typical problem that arises during every search-based retrieval task (in contrast to browsing or filter-based tasks) is the so-called language or vocabulary problem @cite_4 : During the formulization of an information need, a searcher can (in theory) use the unlimited possibilities of human language to express him- or herself @cite_5 . This is especially true when expressing information needs in the scientific domain using domain-specific expressions that are very unique and context-sensitive. Every scientific community and discipline has developed its own special vocabulary that is not commonly used by other researchers from other domains. With regard to survey question retrieval, this problem is even more pronounced as it is likely that the underlying topic of a survey question is not directly represented in the question text. In this special setting of short textual documents and a very domain-specific content, this long-known problem becomes even more pronounced.
@cite_5 @cite_4
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L'A. met en avant les implications de la philosophie du langage pour la recherche d'information, notamment en ce qui concerne les difficultes de la description des contenus intellectuels. Les echecs du processus de recherche d'information sur le plan linguistique se situent aux niveaux de la description et de la discrimination, et dans l'equilibre entre resultat (recall) et precision. L'A. rappelle l'impact des travaux de L. Wittgenstein sur la theorie du langage et plus particulierement sur le sens linguistique : les mots nomment des objets, chaque mot a un sens, le sens d'un mot est independent du contexte, le sens des phrases est constitue du sens des mots. La theorie externaliste des echaffaudages (scaffolding) devrait avoir un impact important sur la description et la classification en recherche d'information. La part de la philosophie du langage dans la litterature sur la recherche d'information demeure toutefois modeste. In almost all computer applications, users must enter correct words for the desired objects or actions. For success without extensive training, or in first-tries for new targets, the system must recognize terms that will be chosen spontaneously. We studied spontaneous word choice for objects in five application-related domains, and found the variability to be surprisingly large. In every case two people favored the same term with probability