Testing a Genre-Enabled Application: A Preliminary Assessment

In this paper we would like to contribute to the discussion about genre-enabled applications, currently engaging many genre researchers, by presenting a preliminary assessment of a web add-on devised to augment the result list of general-purpose search engines with genre labels. For this assessment, we use a small collection of web pages manually annotated with genre labels by a large number of web users. This resource is made up of two sets of web pages created by two independent researchers for their own user-based genre studies. This comparison allows us to provide a preliminary view on the genre add-on performance and to highlight some open issues in genre research.