Composite interests' exploration thanks to on-the-fly linked data spreading activation

Description

Exploratory search systems are built specifically to help the user in his cognitive consuming search tasks like learning or topic investigation. Some of these systems are built on the top of linked data and use semantics to provide cognitively-optimized search experiences. Thanks to their richness and to their connected nature linked data datasets can serve as a ground for advanced exploratory search. We propose to address the case of mixed interests' exploration in the form of composite queries (several unitary interests combined) e.g. exploring results and make discoveries related to both The Beatles and Ken Loach. The main contribution of this paper is the proposition of a novel method that processes linked-data for exploratory search purpose. It makes use of a semantic spreading activation algorithm coupled with a sampling technique. Its particularity is to not require any results preprocessing. Consequently this method offers a high level of flexibility for querying and allows, among others, the expression of composite interests' queries on remote linked data sources. This paper also details the analysis of the algorithm behavior over DBpedia and describes an implementation: the Discovery Hub application. It is an exploratory search engine that notably supports composite queries. Finally the results of a user evaluation are presented.

Abstract

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