Toine Pieters

Thomas Schoegje, Chris Kamphuis, Koen Dercksen et al.

We explore how to generate effective queries based on search tasks. Our approach has three main steps: 1) identify search tasks based on research goals, 2) manually classify search queries according to those tasks, and 3) compare three methods to improve search rankings based on the task context. The most promising approach is based on expanding the user's query terms using task terms, which slightly improved the NDCG@20 scores over a BM25 baseline. Further improvements might be gained if we can identify more specific search tasks.

Berrie van der Molen, Lars Buitinck, Toine Pieters

We introduce our explorative historical leveled approach that we use to understand drug debates in the Royal Dutch Library's digital newspaper archive. In this approach we alternate between distant reading and close reading. Furthermore, we use this approach to evaluate two text mining tools: AVResearcherXL and Texcavator.