K. Rodden
Relevance feedback has great potential as a means of improving the effectiveness of searches. This potential has yet to be fulfilled, especially in real-world systems aimed at novice users. If search interfaces could be designed in such a way that they afforded the seemingly simple act of giving feedback to the system about the relevance of the documents it retrieves, novice users would be able to take advantage of relevance feedback without being required to consult a manual or tutorial. This paper discusses how relevance feedback might be made more accessible to the inexperienced searcher, looking particularly at the lessons learned from a prototype implementation of our own. Implicit forms of gathering relevance feedback are then considered as an alternative.
Paper, Second Glasgow Workshop on Human Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, September 1998.