Implications of Inter-Rater Agreement on a Student Information Retrieval Evaluation

This paper is about an information retrieval evaluation on three different retrieval-supporting services. All three services were designed to compensate typical problems that arise in metadata-driven Digital Libraries, which are not adequately handled by a simple tf-idf based retrieval. The services are: (1) a co-word analysis based query expansion mechanism and re-ranking via (2) Bradfordizing and (3) author centrality. The services are evaluated with relevance assessments conducted by 73 information science students. Since the students are neither information professionals nor domain experts the question of inter-rater agreement is taken into consideration. Two important implications emerge: (1) the inter-rater agreement rates were mainly fair to moderate and (2) after a data-cleaning step which erased the assessments with poor agreement rates the evaluation data shows that the three retrieval services returned disjoint but still relevant result sets.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, LWA 2010, Workshop I

Applying Science Models for Search

The paper proposes three different kinds of science models as value-added services that are integrated in the retrieval process to enhance retrieval quality. The paper discusses the approaches Search Term Recommendation, Bradfordizing and Author Centrality on a general level and addresses implementation issues of the models within a real-life retrieval environment.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, ISI 201

Science Models as Value-Added Services for Scholarly Information Systems

The paper introduces scholarly Information Retrieval (IR) as a further dimension that should be considered in the science modeling debate. The IR use case is seen as a validation model of the adequacy of science models in representing and predicting structure and dynamics in science. Particular conceptualizations of scholarly activity and structures in science are used as value-added search services to improve retrieval quality: a co-word model depicting the cognitive structure of a field (used for query expansion), the Bradford law of information concentration, and a model of co-authorship networks (both used for re-ranking search results). An evaluation of the retrieval quality when science model driven services are used turned out that the models proposed actually provide beneficial effects to retrieval quality. From an IR perspective, the models studied are therefore verified as expressive conceptualizations of central phenomena in science. Thus, it could be shown that the IR perspective can significantly contribute to a better understanding of scholarly structures and activities.Comment: 26 pages, to appear in Scientometric