Explanation of relevance judgement discrepancy with quantum interference

Zhang, Peng; Song, Dawei; Hou, Yuexian; Wang, Jun and Bruza, Peter (2010). Explanation of relevance judgement discrepancy with quantum interference. In: AAAI-Fall 2010 Symposium on Quantum Informatics for Cognitive, Social, and Semantic Processes (QI2010), 11-13 Nov 2010, Washington DC, USA.

URL: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/FSS/FSS10/paper/...

Abstract

A key concept in many Information Retrieval (IR) tasks, e.g. document indexing, query language modelling, aspect and diversity retrieval, is the relevance measure- ment of topics, i.e. to what extent an information object (e.g. a document or a query) is about the topics. This paper investigates the interference of relevance mea- surement of a topic caused by another topic. For ex- ample, consider that two user groups are required to judge whether a topic q is relevant to a document d, and q is presented together with another topic (referred to as a companion topic). If different companion topics are used for different groups, interestingly different rel- evance probabilities of q given d can be reached. In this paper, we present empirical results showing that the relevance of a topic to a document is greatly affected by the companion topic’s relevance to the same document, and the extent of the impact differs with respect to different companion topics. We further analyse the phenomenon from classical and quantum-like interference perspectives, and connect the phenomenon to nonreality and contextuality in quantum mechanics. We demonstrate that quantum like model fits in the empirical data, could be potentially used for predicting the relevance when interference exists.

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