Mental Representation for Text Comprehension during Relevance Judgment

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the relevance judgment process of information retrieval; the way how users compose the mental representation of the retrieved text of database records and comprehend it; correspondence between the text and user's mental representation; the involvement of user's information needs in the process. This study was conducted through an empirical experiment of relevance judgment. The participants are 4 graduate students and 3 undergraduate students whose major are Library information science and Veterinary science. The "relevance elements" (relevant phrases) had been extracted by think-aloud protocols during their relevance judgment process, and those were analyzed from text comprehension viewpoints. At the result we found that users compose the mental representation which does not stand as the retrieved text and they often decide relevance by it. And, the information needs and the inference influenced it.