Emergence of terminological conventions as a searcher–indexer coordination game

David Bodoff

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2009, vol. 60, issue 12, 2509-2529

Abstract: In the traditional model of information retrieval, searchers and indexers choose query and index terms, respectively, and these term choices are ultimately compared in a matching process. One of the main challenges in information science and information retrieval is that searchers and indexers often do not choose the same term even though the item is relevant to the need whereas at other times they do choose the same term even though it is not relevant. But if both searchers and indexers have the opportunity to review feedback data showing the success or failure of their previous term choices, then there exists an evolutionary force that, all else being equal, will lead to helpful convergence in searchers' and indexers' term usage when the information is relevant, and helpful divergence of term usage when it is not. Based on learning theory, and new theory presented here, it is possible to predict which terms will emerge as the terminological conventions that are used by groups of searchers and the indexers of relevant and nonrelevant information items.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21182

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:60:y:2009:i:12:p:2509-2529

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().