Open AccessThe effect of document readability on perceived familiarity and relevance
Author(s) -
Muresan Gheorghe,
Liu Lu,
Cole Michael,
Smith Catherine L.,
Belkin Nicholas J.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.14504201282
Subject(s) - readability , intuition , ranking (information retrieval) , relevance (law) , perception , information retrieval , computer science , boosting (machine learning) , psychology , artificial intelligence , political science , neuroscience , law , programming language , cognitive science
We report on an evaluation of the relationship between document readability, an objective measure related to the length and complexity of words and sentences, and the subjective perception of document relevance of users with a certain level of familiarity to a topic. The research reported here, follow‐up work to our TREC 2004 effort, tries to explain why all our TREC hypotheses were rejected. While trying to understand what was wrong with our intuition, we propose and test new hypotheses. The main conclusion is that readability may improve the chances that a document is judged relevant, which suggests the use of “blind readability feedback”, i.e. boosting the ranking of relevant documents when performing a search in order to improve retrieval performance.