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The advantages of my benefiting from your experience training a system
are obvious. Just as obvious, though, are ways in which you and I might
differ in our notions of relevant documents. Even this comparison is
only possible if we each evaluate exactly the same query, and how often
will that happen?!
If we are to change our representations of documents
based on user's opinions, should we value ``expert" opinion over those
of ``novice?" Common sense would suggest that if we could ascertain that
one user was indeed expert in a particular topical area, then their
assessments of relevance should perhaps carry more weight. But based at
least on the experience of lawyers searching case law [REF1064] [REF122] experts are less likely to search
in their own area of expertise, probably because they already know what
they will find there. The typical user searches in areas they know less
about. In that respect, perhaps the novice's RelFbk is, in fact, a
better characterization of what we should attempt to satisfy?!
Once the
index representation is allowed to change in response to users' we are
faced with the question of just how fast this change should occur. Some
of these questions were mentioned in terms of conceptual drift by users
and topic tracking in news sources (cf. Section §7.3.2 ). Adopting a longer term,
archival perspective of a librarian perhaps, how quickly should we wish
that our adaptive system track current/trendy terms? (cf. {\bf Wired}
magazine's Tired/Wired
Memes feature). When old terms of art have been rendered obsolete,
how can we nevertheless maintain an archival record of this previous
terminology? was not used to describe this area until some time later.
It is interesting to wonder how an IR system might nevertheless be able
to retrieve these old documents in response to a query for
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Adapting to fluid language use
ETHOLOGY.}