As a researcher, I have more questions than answers. And one of the questions that I have is in regards to the widely-accepted maxim that users are too lazy to give explicit relevance feedback to the search engine. See Danny Sullivan’s take, here.
Perhaps I am stuck back in a view of Information Retrieval that is 10-15 years old, but I tend to find my views heavily shaped or influenced by things like the following bit from Marti Hearst’s chapter in Modern Information Retrieval:
An important part of the information access process is query reformulation, and a proven effective technique for query reformulation is relevance feedback. In its original form, relevance feedback refers to an interaction cycle in which the user selects a small set of documents that appear to be relevant to the query, and the system then uses features derived from these selected relevant documents to revise the original query. This revised query is then executed and a new set of documents is returned. Documents from the original set can appear in the new results list, although they are likely to appear in a different rank order. Relevance feedback in its original form has been shown to be an effective mechanism for improving retrieval results in a variety of studies and settings [salton90a][harman92c][buckley94b]. In recent years the scope of ideas that can be classified under this term has widened greatly.
Given that explicit relevance feedback works, why is it essentially non-existent on the web? A bird in the hand (an explicit relevance judgment) is worth two in the bush (two implied or inferred relevance judgments). Continue reading…
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