Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we present an overview of the mining track in the Social Book Search (SBS) lab 2016. The mining track addressed two tasks: (1) classifying forum posts as book search requests, and (2) linking book title mentions in forum posts to unique book IDs in a database. Both tasks are important steps in the process of solving complex search tasks within online reader communities. We prepared two data collections for the classification task: posts from the LibraryThing (LT) forum and a smaller number of posts from Reddit. For the linking task we used annotated LT threads. We found that the classification task was relatively straightforward, achieving up to 94% classification accuracy. The book linking task on the other hand turned out to be a difficult task: here the best system achieved an accuracy of 41% and F-score of 33.5%. Both the automatic classification of book search requests as the automatic linking of book mentions could next year be part of the pipeline for processing complex book searches.