Abstract
At the very center of digital mathematics libraries lie controlled vocabularies which qualify the topic of the documents. These topics are used when submitting a document to a digital mathematics library and to perform searches in a library. The latter are refined by the use of these topics as they allow a precise classification of the mathematics area this document addresses. However, there is a major risk that users employ too precise topics to specify their queries: they may be employing a topic that is only ”close-by” but missing to match the right resource. We call this the topic trap. Indeed, since 2009, this issue has appeared frequently on the i2geo.net platform. Other mathematics portals experience the same phenomenon. An approach to solve this issue is to introduce tolerance in the way queries are understood by the user. In particular, the approach of including fuzzy matches but this introduces noise which may prevent the user of understanding the function of the search engine.
In this paper, we propose a way to escape the topic trap by employing the navigation between related topics and the count of search results for each topic. This supports the user in that search for close-by topics is a click away from a previous search. This approach was realized with the i2geo search engine and is described in detail where the relation of being related is computed by employing textual analysis of the definitions of the concepts fetched from the Wikipedia encyclopedia.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Cairns, P.: Informalising formal mathematics: searching the mizar library. In: Asperti, A., Bancerek, G., Trybulec, A. (eds.) MKM 2004. LNCS, vol. 3119, pp. 58–72. Springer, Heidelberg (2004), http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~pcairns/papers/index.html
Desmoulins, C., Libbrecht, P.: CompEd, a web-based competency ontology editor for dynamic geometry. In: Dicheva, D., Mizoguchi, R., Pinkwart, N. (eds.) Proceedings of SWEL Workshop 2009 (2009), http://hcis.in.tu-clausthal.de/pubs/2009/aied/ontologies_and_social_semantic_web_for_intelligent_educational_systems.pdf
Hearst, M.A.: Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press (2009), http://searchuserinterfaces.com/
Ion, P., Sperber, W.: MSC 2010 in SKOS – the Transition of the MSC to the Semantic Web. EMS Newsletter 84, 55–57 (2012) ISSN 1027-488X, http://www.ems-ph.org/journals/newsletter/pdf/2012-06-84.pdf
Landauer, T.K., Dumais, S.T.: A solution to plato’s problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review 104(2), 211 (1997) ISBN 978-1-60750-062-9, http://lsa.colorado.edu/papers/plato/plato.annote.html
Libbrecht, P., Desmoulins, C.: A cross-curriculum representation for handling and searching dynamic geometry competencies. In: Dicheva, D., Mizoguchi, R., Greer, J. (eds.) Semantic Web Technologies for e-Learning. The future of learning, vol. 4. IOS Press (2009) ISBN 978-1-60750-062-9
Libbrecht, P., Kortenkamp, U.: The role of metadata in the design of educational activities. In: Mariotti, M.A., et al. (eds.) To appear in Proceedings of the Conference on European Research in Mathematics Education (2013), Pre-conference papers are available at http://cerme8.metu.edu.tr/wgpapers/wg15_papers.html
Libbrecht, P., Kortenkamp, U., Mercat, C.: I2Geo: a Web-Library of Interactive Geometry. In: Proceedings of DML 2009 (July 2009), http://i2geo.net/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Proceedings
Megalou, E.: Re: Multilang-search-lors-overview.rtf. Received per email with message id 000301cd2a1a$e4c11db0$ae435910$@gr+ (May 2012)
Widdows, D., Cohen, T.: The semantic vectors package: New algorithms and public tools for distributional semantics. In: Fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (IEEE ICSC 2010). IEEE Computer Society (2010), https://code.google.com/p/semanticvectors/wiki/RelatedResearch
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Libbrecht, P. (2013). Escaping the Trap of Too Precise Topic Queries. In: Carette, J., Aspinall, D., Lange, C., Sojka, P., Windsteiger, W. (eds) Intelligent Computer Mathematics. CICM 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7961. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39320-4_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39320-4_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39319-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39320-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)