Information Seeking in Academic Learning Environments: An Exploratory Factor Analytic Approach to Understanding Design Features

摘要

Traditional information retrieval (IR) systems perform retrieval by "closely matching" a query to a set of documents objectively without considering users' contexts [4]. We aim to enhance objective relevance and address its limitations by taking a quantitative, subjective relevance (SR) approach. SR provides suitable theoretical underpinnings as it focuses on a document's relevance for users' needs. There are four SR types [1]: topical, pertinence, situational, and motivational relevance.