Geographic dimensions of relevance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the emerging geographic features of current concepts of relevance, and to improve, modify, and extend the framework proposed by Mizzaro (1998). The objective is to define a new framework able to account, more completely and precisely, for the notions of relevance involved in mobile information seeking scenarios. Design/methodology/approach – The authors formalise two new dimensions of relevance. The first dimension emphasises the spatio-temporal nature of the information seeking process. The second dimension allows us to describe how different concepts of relevance rely on different abstractions of reality. Findings – The new framework allows: to conceptualise the point in space and time at which a given notion of relevance refers to; to conceptualise the level of abstraction taken into account by a given notion of relevance; and to include widely adopted facets (e.g. users mobility, preferences, and social context) in the classification of notions of relevance. Originality/value – The conceptual discussion presented in this paper contributes to the future development of relevance in the scope of mobile information seeking scenarios. The authors provide a more comprehensive framework for conceptualization, development, and classification of notions of relevance in the field of information retrieval and location-based services

The many dimensions of truthfulness: Crowdsourcing misinformation assessments on a multidimensional scale

Recent work has demonstrated the viability of using crowdsourcing as a tool for evaluating the truthfulness of public statements. Under certain conditions such as: (1) having a balanced set of workers with different backgrounds and cognitive abilities; (2) using an adequate set of mechanisms to control the quality of the collected data; and (3) using a coarse grained assessment scale, the crowd can provide reliable identification of fake news. However, fake news are a subtle matter: statements can be just biased (“cherrypicked”), imprecise, wrong, etc. and the unidimensional truth scale used in existing work cannot account for such differences. In this paper we propose a multidimensional notion of truthfulness and we ask the crowd workers to assess seven different dimensions of truthfulness selected based on existing literature: Correctness, Neutrality, Comprehensibility, Precision, Completeness, Speaker's Trustworthiness, and Informativeness. We deploy a set of quality control mechanisms to ensure that the thousands of assessments collected on 180 publicly availabl