The Influence of Language Proficiency on Book Search Behaviour

In this paper we describe our participation in the Interactive Social Book Search task at CLEF 2015. We focus our analysis on differences in search behaviour between native and non-native speakers of English. The analysis is based on both questionnaire and log data. 49 participants out of the 192 total participants are native speakers and the remaining 143 participants are nonnative speakers. In general results show surprisingly few differences in search behaviour between native and non-native speakers. Non-native speakers spent more time on both the focused and the open task than the native speakers, but no significant differences were found in relation to number of queries, query length, depth of results inspection, number of books added to the book-bag, or length of notes explaining why a book was added to the book-bag.