Social networks and information retrieval, how are they converging? A survey, a taxonomy and an analysis of social information retrieval approaches and platforms

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThere is currently a number of research work performed in the area of bridging the gap between Information Retrieval (IR) and Online Social Networks (OSN). This is mainly done by enhancing the IR process with information coming from social networks, a process called Social Information Retrieval (SIR). The main question one might ask is What would be the benefits of using social information (no matter whether it is content or structure) into the information retrieval process and how is this currently done?With the growing number of efforts towards the combination of IR and social networks, it is necessary to build a clearer picture of the domain and synthesize the efforts in a structured and meaningful way. This paper reviews different efforts in this domain. It intends to provide a clear understanding of the issues as well as a clear structure of the contributions. More precisely, we propose (i) to review some of the most important contributions in this domain to understand the principles of SIR, (ii) a taxonomy to categorize these contributions, and finally, (iii) an analysis of some of these contributions and tools with respect to several criteria, which we believe are crucial to design an effective SIR approach. This paper is expected to serve researchers and practitioners as a reference to help them structuring the domain, position themselves and, ultimately, help them to propose new contributions or improve existing ones.

Modeling Influence with Semantics in Social Networks

“…As a result it covers only the "Social Matching: User-oriented" category as we have presented in this survey. Table 2 provides comparative insights of this work in respect to the surveys described in [15], [85], [98], [106] and [107].. It consists of three columns.…”

Applicability of a food chain analysis on aquaculture of Atlantic salmon to identify and monitor vulnerabilities and drivers of change for the identification of emerging risks

“…ask-Valerie (Willems et al, 2015) is an example of an IR system that uses ontologies in the domain of agriculture and forestry for QE. Another approach is to use user profiles and social context to deliver more personalised QE (Bouadjenek et al, 2016).…”

Enhanced Personalized Search using Social Data

“…In personalized search using social media (Jamali and Ester, 2010;Lin et al, 2013), the search process is either performed over "social" data gathered from Web 2.0 applications such as social bookmarking systems, wikis, blogs etc., or it readapts the web search results produced by search engines by using social data (Carman et al, 2008;Bouadjenek et al, 2016). For example, the authors in (Vallet et al, 2010) investigated how the ranking of search engine results can be improved with respect to users if the users' social information is taken into consideration.…”

“…Thus the social annotation or bookmarking system demonstrates an extreme example of the vocabulary mismatch problem encountered in personalized web search. To tackle the problem, various personalized query expansion (QE) and results reranking techniques have been proposed and evaluated (Bouadjenek et al, 2016).…”