Epistemological Issues
Are users best at evaluating the relevance of a given document, or is it better to use experts? Most research about relevance in information retrieval in recent years have implicitly assumed that the users' evaluation of the output a given system should be used to increase "relevance" output. An alternative strategy would be to use journal impact factor to rank output and thus base relevance on expert evaluations. Other strategies, such as including diversity of the search results, may be used as well. The important thing to recognize is, however, that relevance is fundamentally a question of epistemology, not psychology. (Peoples' psychology reflects certain epistemological influences).
Read more about this topic: Relevance (information Retrieval)
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