Users' perception of relevance of spoken documents

We present the results of a study of user’s perception of relevance of documents. The aim is to study experimentally how users’ perception varies depending on the form that retrieved documents are presented. Documents retrieved in response to a query are presented to users in a variety of ways, from full text to a machine spoken query-biased automatically-generated summary, and the difference in users’ perception of relevance is studied. The experimental results suggest that the effectiveness of advanced multimedia Information Retrieval applications may be affected by the low level of users’ perception of relevance of retrieved documents.