Assessing the Value of Peer-Produced Information for Exploratory Search

TL;DR

This paper develops a formal, information-theoretical method to quantify the value of user-generated tags in exploratory search, linking qualitative insights with empirical validation to enhance collaborative tagging systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, formal approach to measure tag value based on their ability to reduce search space, supported by qualitative analysis and real data evaluation.

Findings

Tags deemed more important by users have higher quantified value.

The proposed method accurately predicts user-perceived tag importance.

Qualitative analysis identified key factors influencing tag value perception.

Abstract

Tagging is a popular feature that supports several collaborative tasks, including search, as tags produced by one user can help others finding relevant content. However, task performance depends on the existence of 'good' tags. A first step towards creating incentives for users to produce 'good' tags is the quantification of their value in the first place. This work fills this gap by combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. In particular, using contextual interviews, we first determine aspects that influence users' perception of tags' value for exploratory search. Next, we formalize some of the identified aspects and propose an information-theoretical method with provable properties that quantifies the two most important aspects (according to the qualitative analysis) that influence the perception of tag value: the ability of a tag to reduce the search space while retrieving relevant items to the user. The evaluation on real data shows that our method is accurate: tags that users consider more important have higher value than tags users have not expressed interest.