CNSVRE: A Query Reformulated Search System with Explainable Summarization for Virtual Research Environment Na Li Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands n.li@uva.nl Yangjun Zhang Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands y.zhang6@uva.nl Zhiming Zhao Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands z.zhao@uva.nl ABSTRACT Computational notebook environments have drawn broad attention in data-centric research applications, e.g., virtual research environ- ment, for exploratory data analysis and algorithm prototyping. Vanilla computational notebook search solutions have been pro- posed but they do not pay much attention to the information needs of scientific researchers. Previous studies either treat computational notebook search as a code search problem or focus on content-based computational notebook search. The queries being considered are neither research-concerning nor diversified whereas researchers’ information needs are highly specialized and complex. Moreover, relevance evaluation for computational notebooks is tricky and unreliable since computational notebooks contain fragments of text and code and are usually poorly organized. To solve the above chal- lenges, we propose a computational notebook search system for virtual research environment (VRE), i.e., CNSVRE, with scientific query reformulation and computational notebook summarization. We conduct a user study to demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with the system. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems →Personalization; Query reformula- tion; Summarization. KEYWORDS computational notebook search, virtual research environment, sci- entific query reformulation, code summarization ACM Reference Format: Na Li, Yangjun Zhang, and Zhiming Zhao. 2023. CNSVRE: A Query Reformu- lated Search System with Explainable Summarization for Virtual Research Environment. In Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (WWW ’23 Companion), April 30-May 4, 2023, Austin, TX, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543873.3587360 1 INTRODUCTION The virtual research environment, a collaborative platform designed to support research activities, has been widely used for supporting the research community with access to tools, resources, and ser- vices [Barker et al. 2019]. Computational notebook environments, Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). WWW ’23 Companion, April 30-May 4, 2023, Austin, TX, USA © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9419-2/23/04. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543873.3587360 e.g., Jupyter notebook, are promising solutions for hosting VRE ser- vices. Users can carry out frequent data manipulation, investigate various data analytic approaches, and demonstrate the access and usage of datasets, models, libraries, or APIs with computational notebooks [Perkel 2018; Rule et al. 2018]. Collecting computational notebooks and building a search system for VREs help scientists discover research resources published through computational note- books and reduce repetitive work [Zhao et al. 2022]. There are several studies on computational notebook search [Ho- riuchi et al. 2022; Li et al. 2021]. One branch of work emphasizes code fragments of computational notebooks and returns code snip- pets given natural language queries [Li et al. 2021]. They essentially treat computational notebook search as a code search problem and aim to bridge the gap between programming language and natural language. Nevertheless, the queries being considered are rather programming-oriented than research-or