The Role of Language Skills in Interactive Social Book Search Sessions

When searching for books, people frequently have to deal with content that is in a language different from their own. However, research on multilingual systems has generally focused on the user interface's language rather than the content language. In this paper, we describe and compare early results from the multilingual aspects in the Interactive Social Book Search (iSBS) task at CLEF 2014 and 2015. A preliminary analysis of usage patterns for native English and non-native English speakers indicates an influence of language skills on search behaviour during goal-oriented and casual leisure tasks. Based on previous experiences and results, strengths and challenges of IIR studies are discussed