Abstract
This article presents a study of how humans perceive and judge the relevance of documents. Humans are adept at making reasonably robust and quick decisions about what information is relevant to them, despite the ever increasing complexity and volume of their surrounding information environment. The literature on document relevance has identified various dimensions of relevance (e.g., topicality, novelty, etc.), however little is understood about how these dimensions may interact. We performed a crowdsourced study of how human subjects judge two relevance dimensions in relation to document snippets retrieved from an internet search engine. The order of the judgment was controlled. For those judgments exhibiting an order effect, a q–test was performed to determine whether the order effects can be explained by a quantum decision model based on incompatible decision perspectives. Some evidence of incompatibility was found which suggests incompatible decision perspectives is appropriate for explaining interacting dimensions of relevance in such instances.
Highlights
This article aims to shed light on how humans judge the relevance of documents
This article put forward an experimental framework for examining whether dimensions of relevance interact via an order effect
The data collected from a crowdsourced study suggests that in some decisions regarding dimensions of relevance, this interaction can be explained in terms of a quantum model based on incompatible decision perspectives
Summary
This article aims to shed light on how humans judge the relevance of documents. We will, take a modern view of what a document is. Nowadays individuals and groups interact with one another in a variety of information environments of ever increasing complexity. They are accessing search engines, sharing messages on Facebook, browsing short messages on their mobile devices from microblog sites like Twitter. Document relevance has been carefully studied over more than three decades within the fields of information science usually by identifying or employing known inter-subjective dimensions of relevance (Schamber et al, 1990; Barry, 1994; Mizzaro, 1997; Borlund, 2003). Barry and Schamber (1998) identified the dimensions “presentation quality,” “currency,” “reliability,” “verifiability,” “geographic proximity,” “specificity,” “dynamism” and “accessibility” in a comprehensive study. Chu (2012) identified the dimensions “specificity,” “ease of use” and “breadth” in the context of legal documents
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