AUTHOR=Bruza Peter , Chang Vivien 

TITLE=Perceptions of document relevance

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 5 - 2014

YEAR=2014

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00612

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00612

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=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.