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Understanding the retrieval effectiveness of collaborative tags and author keywords in different retrieval environments: An experimental study on medical collections
Author(s) -
Lu Kun,
Kipp Margaret E.I.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.22985
Subject(s) - computer science , information retrieval , phrase , search engine indexing , precision and recall , recall , document retrieval , word (group theory) , natural language processing , philosophy , linguistics
This study investigates the retrieval effectiveness of collaborative tags and author keywords in different environments through controlled experiments. Three test collections were built. The first collection tests the impact of tags on retrieval performance when only the title and abstract are available (the abstract environment). The second tests the impact of tags when the full text is available (the full‐text environment). The third compares the retrieval effectiveness of tags and author keywords in the abstract environment. In addition, both single‐word queries and phrase queries are tested to understand the impact of different query types. Our findings suggest that including tags and author keywords in indexes can enhance recall but may improve or worsen average precision depending on retrieval environments and query types. Indexing tags and author keywords for searching using phrase queries in the abstract environment showed improved average precision, whereas indexing tags for searching using single‐word queries in the full‐text environment led to a significant drop in average precision. The comparison between tags and author keywords in the abstract environment indicates that they have comparable impact on average precision, but author keywords are more advantageous in enhancing recall. The findings from this study provide useful implications for designing retrieval systems that incorporate tags and author keywords.