Wikipedia Pages as Entry Points for Book Search

A lot of the world’s knowledge is stored in books, which, as a result
of recent mass-digitisation efforts, are increasingly available online.
Search engines, such as Google Books, provide mechanisms
for searchers to enter this vast knowledge space using queries as
entry points. In this paper, we view Wikipedia as a summary of
this world knowledge and aim to use this resource to guide users to
relevant books. Thus, we investigate possible ways of using Wikipedia
as an intermediary between the user’s query and a collection
of books being searched. We experiment with traditional query expansion
techniques, exploiting Wikipedia articles as rich sources
of information that can augment the user’s query. We then propose
a novel approach based on link distance in an extended Wikipedia
graph: we associate books with Wikipedia pages that cite these
books and use the link distance between these nodes and the pages
that match the user query as an estimation of a book’s relevance to
the query. Our results show that a) classical query expansion using
terms extracted from query pages leads to increased precision, and
b) link distance between query and book pages in Wikipedia provides
a good indicator of relevance that can boost the retrieval score
of relevant books in the result ranking of a book search engine.