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Top1. Introduction
As people throughout the world continue their reliance on the Internet to fulfill their information needs (Khatwani & Srivastava, 2017) and as the Internet continues its profound impact on people and societies (Teo, 2007; Lane, et al., 2017), researchers have explored ways to maximize successes of Internet-based technology implementations or global information management (Roztocki & Weistroffer, 2011; Caprio, et al., 2015; Hung, et al., 2016; Silic & Back, 2016; Soja, 2016; Chatterjee, et al., 2017). Effective information retrieval from the Internet has remained an important topic in the field of global information management.
The key objective of information retrieval is to find relevant information. Therefore, the concept of relevance has been recognized as a fundamental issue to the evaluation of information retrieval systems as well as search engines (Borlund, 2003; Saracevic, 2007a; Zhang & Fei, 2010; Zhang et al., 2013). Relevance measures the effectiveness of a connection between a source and a target in a communication process (Saracevic, 1975).
Classic research on information retrieval concentrates on the techniques for the comparison of the representation of documents and search queries (Vakkari, 1999). Regarding the effectiveness of retrieval systems, traditional measures include precision and recall (Davidson, 1977). Typically, information retrieval systems treat all users the same way. However, more recent studies have regarded the information retrieval process as an interaction between users and the information retrieval system. From the user’s perspective, information retrieval systems should be designed to satisfy user information needs.
Some believe that information and culture cannot be partitioned since culture is composed of different and transmitted social information (Kim, 2013). Culture has been demonstrated as a key factor for the understanding of human behavior because culture could influence perceptions, opinions, and ultimately reactions to behavior. Cultural differences may shape information-processing procedures (Gutchess & Indeck, 2009), and cross-cultural differences may affect individuals’ information behaviors (Schwartz, et al, 2014). Some identified that information searching behavior differed between Chinese subjects and German subjects (Honold, 1999). Some explored differences in information seeking behaviors among software engineers from various countries and found that US and European subjects preferred non-social sources, while Indian and Pakistan participants favored social sources (Milewski, 2007). Therefore, understanding how cultural differences influence users’ relevance judgment is crucial to information-retrieval research.
The primary research objective of this study is to explore possible differences between American users and Chinese users in relevance judgment of retrieval results from search engines. To achieve this purpose, relevance judgments by two assessor groups of retrieval result in different domain categories were compared, interactions between the assessor groups and the domain categories were analyzed, and gender differences in relevance judgments were explored. The findings of this study can enhance understanding of cultural differences in information retrieval and can assist in the design of effective cross-language search engines.