Overview of the SBS 2016 Mining Track

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.