Perceptions of document relevance

This article presents a study of how humans perceive the relevance of documents.<br/>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. <br/>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.<br/>We performed a crowdsourced study of how human subjects judge two relevance dimensions in relation to document snippets retrieved from an internet search engine.<br/>The order of the judgement was controlled.<br/>For those judgements 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.<br/>Some evidence of incompatibility was found which suggests incompatible decision perspectives is appropriate for explaining interacting dimensions of relevance.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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