Recall Cues in Known Item Retrieval
Bryce Allen
JASIS 40(4):246-252, 1989

Describes a study where subjects were to read a paper carefully and then answer a series of questions on the paper at a later date. The questions ("cues" in the paper) were designed in three different forms: structural, bibliographic and free-response. The cues were then mined for keywords and matched with the paper's actual keyword and index terms to assess their suitability for known-item recall.

Bibliographic cues produced the shortest entries but most targeted. Allen suggests that longer cues need to be processed to remove unnecessary and (potentially) non-matching words. Longer cues may be more useful when the search is transferred to a human intermediary.

Note that the known-item retrieval is implicit, the test wasn't actually done with a retrieval system, just evaluated on the basis of cosine similarity.
- posted by Min-Yen @ 08:30 5 comments