Seth van Hooland

Anne Chardonnens, Ettore Rizza, Mathias Coeckelbergs et al.

Purpose: Advanced usage of Web Analytics tools allows to capture the content of user queries. Despite their relevant nature, the manual analysis of large volumes of user queries is problematic. This paper demonstrates the potential of using information extraction techniques and Linked Data to gather a better understanding of the nature of user queries in an automated manner. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents a large-scale case-study conducted at the Royal Library of Belgium consisting of a data set of 83 854 queries resulting from 29 812 visits over a 12 month period of the historical newspapers platform BelgicaPress. By making use of information extraction methods, knowledge bases and various authority files, this paper presents the possibilities and limits to identify what percentage of end users are looking for person and place names. Findings: Based on a quantitative assessment, our method can successfully identify the majority of person and place names from user queries. Due to the specific character of user queries and the nature of the knowledge bases used, a limited amount of queries remained too ambiguous to be treated in an automated manner. Originality/value: This paper demonstrates in an empirical manner both the possibilities and limits of gaining more insights from user queries extracted from a Web Analytics tool and analysed with the help of information extraction tools and knowledge bases. Methods and tools used are generalisable and can be reused by other collection holders.

Thomas Steiner, Seth van Hooland, Ed Summers

We have developed an application called Wikipedia Live Monitor that monitors article edits on different language versions of Wikipedia, as they happen in realtime. Wikipedia articles in different languages are highly interlinked. For example, the English article en:2013_Russian_meteor_event on the topic of the February 15 meteoroid that exploded over the region of Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, is interlinked with the Russian article on the same topic. As we monitor multiple language versions of Wikipedia in parallel, we can exploit this fact to detect concurrent edit spikes of Wikipedia articles covering the same topics, both in only one, and in different languages. We treat such concurrent edit spikes as signals for potential breaking news events, whose plausibility we then check with full-text cross-language searches on multiple social networks. Unlike the reverse approach of monitoring social networks first, and potentially checking plausibility on Wikipedia second, the approach proposed in this paper has the advantage of being less prone to false-positive alerts, while being equally sensitive to true-positive events, however, at only a fraction of the processing cost.