Balancing the Fluency-Consistency Tradeoff in Collaborative Information Search with a Recommender Approach

Abstract

Creative group work can be supported by collaborative search and annotation of Web resources. In this setting, it is important to help individuals both stay fluent in generating ideas of what to search next (i.e., maintain ideational fluency) and stay consistent in annotating resources (i.e., maintain organization). Based on a model of human memory, we hypothesize that sharing search results with other users, such as through bookmarks and social tags, prompts search processes in memory, which increase ideational fluency, but decrease the consistency of annotations, e.g., the reuse of tags for topically similar resources. To balance this tradeoff, we suggest the tag recommender SoMe, which is designed to simulate search of memory from user-specific tag-topic associations. An experimental field study (N = 18) in a workplace context finds evidence of the expected tradeoff and an advantage of SoMe over a conventional recommender in the collaborative setting. We conclude that sharing search results supports group creativity by increasing the ideational fluency, and that SoMe helps balancing the evidenced fluency-consistency tradeoff.

Knowledge structures for integrating working and learning: A reflection on a decade of learning technology research for workplace learning

“…In a study that used the Social Semantic Server, we found evidence that feeding back emergent tag networks in a work‐integrated web curation scenario led to higher levels of shared understanding in the group. When recommending tags in such situation, these were more readily accepted, if the recommender services made use of the emerging category–tag relationship (Seitlinger et al, ).…”

“…Tags were also seen as a way to negotiate the meaning of particular experiences and established shared understanding in a group of learners (Dennerlein, Seitlinger, Lex, & Ley, 2016). Several services made use of the tags produced, eg, recommender services for resources (Seitlinger et al, 2015) or tag recommenders that were intended to drive the consistency of how objects were described (Seitlinger et al, 2018).…”

The Impact of Semantic Context Cues on the User Acceptance of Tag Recommendations

“…The collected data for both groups as well as for the full dataset is shown in Table 1. For details on the study design, please see [6].…”