Enhancing Dataset Search with Compact Data Snippets

In light of the growing availability and significance of open data, the problem of dataset search has attracted great attention in the field of information retrieval. Nevertheless, current metadata-based approaches have revealed shortcomings due to the low quality and availability of dataset metadata, while the magnitude and heterogeneity of actual data hindered the development of content-based solutions. To address these challenges, we propose to convert different formats of structured data into a unified form, from which we extract a compact data snippet that indicates the relevance of the whole data. Thanks to its compactness, we feed it into a dense reranker to improve search accuracy. We also convert it back to the original format to be presented for assisting users in relevance judgment. The effectiveness of our approach has been demonstrated by extensive experiments on two test collections for dataset search.