The document discusses a two-stage iterative search process that allows users to craft high-level strategies for retrieving political data, such as parliamentary proceedings in the Netherlands. It emphasizes various search techniques including semantic and exploratory search, accommodating diverse retrieval unit types beyond just documents. The goal is to empower search professionals to design tailored search strategies, enhancing transparency and trust in information retrieval methods.

1. Searching
Political Data
by Strategy
Roberto Cornacchia
Jaap Kamps
Wouter Alink
Arjen P. de Vries
info@spinque.com

2. Search by Strategy
 An iterative 2-stage search process
 Express domain knowledge as high-level
search strategies
 Generate search engine from the strategy
 A dynamic REST API
 UI controls for unspecified parameters
 Separate search strategy definition (the
how) from actual searching and browsing
of data collections (the what)

4. https://devel.spinque.com/ExPoSeApp-20130116/?config=demo#
dashboard/demo04:
/p/topic/Mokken

5. Search by Strategy captures:
 Arbitrary retrieval unit types (not just
documents)
 E.g., expert finding, entity search
 “Semantic” search
 The building blocks operate on scored triples
 Semi-structured search
 Data objects may be structured in hierarchies
 Exploratory search
 Use facets as preferences

6. Exposé
 Searching the parliamentary proceedings
of the Dutch parliament
 Complete transcripts of everything said in
parliament
 Organized by parliamentary session
 Detailing who sais what in what role and
context

7. Exposé
 Original data is PDF, transformed into
XML by award-winning project Political
Mashup
 http://politicalmashup.nl/

8. In Politics…
 Essence is not only what is said, but also
by who and to whom, and why
 Concrete example:
 Wilders sais “knettergek” in parliament (in
2007) – is this remarkable?

10. “Knettergek” case
The word “knettergek” has been used many
times in parliament…
… but never to address a member of the
government

11. Varying result types
Utterances
Person / Party / …

12. Flexibility
 Concrete case:
 Maarten: “I cannot find Prof. Mokken, who I
know has been spoken about in parliament
multiple times!”

13. Flexibility
 Default indexing uses stemming and
normalization
 But… searching for people’s names (and,
as we mention it, many other domain
specific terminology) can be negatively
affected by stemming
 “Mokken” transformed into “mok”, leading us to
geographic locations “Mook” and “De Mok”, but not
to the famous professor!

16. https://devel.spinque.com/ExPoSeApp-20130116/?config=demo#dashboard/demo05:
/p/topic/mokken/p/emphasis_stemming/0

17. Joins to the rescue!
Which house speakers from the Rotterdam harbour
say what about “Amsterdam”?

18. Semantic Search
biographies
describes
person
utterance

19. Advantages
 Define and execute custom build search
strategies
 Specialized to the task, or even to the search
at hand
 Search multiple data sources at once
 Explore and refine results interactively
 “Search provenance”
 Complete transparency on how search results
were obtained

20. Position Statement
 Search professionals think in terms of
search strategies already
 Let them design their own strategies, and
thereby tailor their search engines
 So they learn to trust what we claim to be
the effective information retrieval
techniques!