“What was this movie about this chick?”: A comparative study of relevance aspects in book and movie discovery

Abstract

In recent decades, information retrieval research has slowly expanded its focus to address the wealth of complex search requests present in our work and leisure environments. A better understanding of such complex needs could aid in the design of more effective, domain-specific search engines. In this paper we take a first step towards such domain-specific understanding. We present an analysis of a random sample of 1000+ complex book and movie search requests posted in the LibraryThing and Internet Movie Database forums. A coding scheme was developed that captures the 29 different relevance aspects expressed in these requests. We find that while the identified relevance aspects are remarkably similar for complex book and movie requests, their relative occurrence does vary considerably from domain to domain.