Mitigating Selective Filtering’s Polarizing Effect on Web 2.0 Content

For almost two decades, the Internet and related technologies have made more information available to information usersthan they can handle. The decentralization of content creation that is a feature of Web 2.0 has only exacerbated this problem.This state of overload, combined with our tendency toward hypothesis-confirming behavior, can result in biased informationselection, and threatens both civil discourse and effective decision-making. In this paper, we describe a study of a techniquedesigned to mitigate filtering by enabling content consumers to see a greater diversity of information. The results of ourexperiment support the notion that the strength of people’s opinions can be changed by reading relevant information, butprovide only weak support for the effectiveness of categorizing information content. We discuss how the results will guideour future research and inform theory and practice

Effectiveness of Shallow Hierarchies for Document Stores

Employees spend as much as 4.4 hours every week searching for documents that they never find. Despite this cost, most managers continue to believe that there is no viable alternative to keyword search. In this paper we present the results of an experiment which uses the eight level hierarchy of ABI/Inform to test how many levels are necessary to retrieve one specific paper. Our findings demonstrate empirically that a browsable subject hierarchy of just four levels provides almost as accurate a search result at deeper layers. Therefore the cost of implementing and maintaining a browsable hierarchy is not nearly as high as is frequently estimated. This has significant implications for both researchers and practitioners

Word Ambiguity and Search: Implications for Enterprise Performance Management

The proliferation of unstructured data is a growing threat to effective enterprise performance management. Enterprise search is a tool to help organizations more effectively manage this document-based information. The success of full-text enterprise search is limited by ambiguity in word meanings, which can result in many documents returned which are not relevant to the searcher. While early work by Zipf provided a first attempt at quantifying the impact of this issue on search, little work has been done to demonstrate the applicability of Zipf’s work to contemporary document collections. In this paper we examine whether the frequency-meaning relationship discovered by Zipf holds for contemporary document collections, and whether it consistently holds across different subject domains. We then discuss the implications of our results for the development and use of user-centered KPIs designed to measure the enterprise wide effectiveness of search activities