Overview of the INEX 2012 Social Book Search Track

The goal of the INEX 2012 Social Book Search Track is to evaluate approaches for supporting users in reading, searching, and navigating book metadata and full texts of digitised books as well as associated user-generated content. The investigation is focused around two tasks: 1) the Social Book Search task investigates the complex nature relevance in book search and the role of user information and traditional and user-generated book metadata for retrieval, 2) the Prove It task evaluates focused retrieval approaches for searching pages in books that support or refute a given factual claim. There are two additional tasks that did not run this year. The Structure Extraction task tests automatic techniques for deriving structure from OCR and layout information, and the Active Reading Task aims to explore suitable user interfaces for eBooks enabling reading, annotation, review, and summary across multiple books. We report on the setup and the results of the two search tasks.