Navigation leads for exploratory search and navigation in digital libraries

Abstract

Exploratory search (in contrary to the traditional lookup search) is characterized by the search tasks that have exploration, learning, and investigation as their goals. An example of this task in the domain of digital libraries is exploration of a new domain, a task that is typically performed by a researcher novice, such as a master’s or a doctoral student. To support the researcher novices in this task, we proposed an approach of exploratory search and navigation using navigation leads, with which we augment the search results, and which serve as navigation starting points allowing users to follow a specific path by filtering only documents pertinent to the selected lead. In this paper, we present a method of selection of navigation leads considering their navigational value in the form of a corpus relevance. We examined this method by the means of an offline evaluation on the dataset from a bookmarking service Annota. We showed that considering the corpus relevance helps to cover significantly more (relevant) documents when conducting the exploratory search. In addition, our relevance metric combining document and corpus relevance of a lead outperformed the popularity metric based on the frequency of the term in the document corpus.